Correct vCard format for iOS devices?

objective-c ios abaddressbook
Andrei picture Andrei · Dec 17, 2012 · Viewed 15.6k times · Source

In iOS 5 and above, Apple introduced the ABPersonCreatePeopleInSourceWithVCardRepresentation method, which is pretty useful in feeding a vCard to the Address Book and getting back the ABRecordRefs for the persons created.

However, the Apple vCard seems to be (at least a bit) different from a standard vCard, as I have found out while trying to add standard vCards to the Address Book. Is there a page somewhere detailing what the Apple-format for a vCard should be?

Thanks!

Answer

aaronsnoswell picture aaronsnoswell · Jan 12, 2013

The ABPersonCreatePeopleInSourceWithVCardRepresentation docs state that vCard version 3 is the supported protocol. Unfortunately if you're having troubles with a standard vCard I'm not sure how to help - I did a fair bit of searching (that bounty is good motivation :P) and wasn't able to find any further information.

I don't have my iPhone on me to test, but this guy claims to have successfully imported the following, v2.1 vCard on an iPhone 4 using a QR scanner app (which might be using the API in question). The 3.0 spec is a superset of the 2.1 spec - can you try this vCard and let me know if it works?

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:;Company Name
FN:Company Name
ORG:Company Name
TEL;WORK;VOICE;PREF:+16045551212
TEL;WORK;FAX:+16045551213
ADR;WORK;POSTAL;PARCEL;DOM;PREF:;;123 main street;vancouver;bc;v0v0v0;canada
EMAIL;INTERNET;PREF:[email protected]
URL;WORK;PREF:http://www.example.com/
NOTE:http://www.example.com/
CATEGORIES:BUSINESS,WORK
UID:A64440FC-6545-11E0-B7A1-3214E0D72085
REV:20110412165200
END:VCARD

You can read the official 3.0 spec here and here.

As a last ditch solution, there are plenty of vCard parsers out there - it's a dead simple protocol. You could just take any of these (or write one yourself) and manually add the contact to the Address Book using ABPersonCreatePeopleInSourceWithVCardRepresentation.

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