Writing contacts

Permission required

The examples shown below assume that your app has already been granted the WRITE_CONTACTS permission. This is not handled by Contact Store.

Insert a new contact

Contact Store provides a flexible way of creating new contacts. The following example shows how to create a new contact:

val store = ContactStore.newInstance(application)

store.execute {
    insert {
        firstName = "Paolo"
        lastName = "Melendez"
        phone(
            value = PhoneNumber("555"),
            label = Label.PhoneNumberMobile
        )
        mail(
            address = "paolo@paolo.com",
            label = Label.LocationWork
        )
    }
}

The insert() function takes an optional InternetAccount parameter. The new contact will be stored in the given account if it is editable.

Tip

You can query all available accounts by using the AccountManager class.

Update an existing contact

All contacts emitted by Contact Store are immutable. In order to modify a contact, you first need to get a reference of the contact from the store. The Contact.mutableCopy() function returns a version of the contact that you can modify. Only the values queried can be updated. This is by design, in order to prevent accidental value overrides.

Updating the copy's values will not directly update the contacts of the device. When you are happy with your changes and want to commit them, pass the updated contact into update().

The following code modifies a contact's note:

val foundContacts = store.fetchContacts(
    predicate = ContactLookup(contactId = 5L),
    columnsToFetch = listOf(ContactColumn.Note)
).first()
if (foundContacts.isEmpty()) return // the contact was not found

val contact = foundContacts.first()

store.execute {
    update(contact.mutableCopy {
        note = Note("To infinity and beyond!")
    })
}

Deleting a contact

The following code shows how to delete a contact by id:

store.execute {
    delete(contactId = 5L)
}