Using Contacts.app with TextExpander v2: Objective-C and JavaScript

Posted on 2015-10-24

I was generally happy with how I was using Contacts.app with TextExpander to create snippets for my emails, phone numbers and addresses. However, as I eventually realized, I have to have Contacts.app running for it to work. When AppleScript and JavaScript talk to applications in OS X, they have to be running. That isn't the case for C and Objective-C libraries, so I decided to see how hard it was to use the Objective-C bindings for Javascript.

The documentation is just as sparse in the developer documentation, however this article by Tyler Gaw helped get me started in understanding how to represent Objective-C methods in Javascript. It's probably easiest to just show the script and explain what's going on.

ObjC.import("AddressBook");
sAB = $.ABAddressBook.sharedAddressBook
meRecord = sAB.me

var propertyToObjCType = {
    'email': $.kABEmailProperty,
    'address': $.kABAddressProperty,
    'phone': $.kABPhoneProperty
}

var labelToObjCType = {
    'work': $.kABWorkLabel,
    'home': $.kABHomeLabel,
    'iPhone': $.kABPhoneiPhoneLabel,
}

function valueForProperty(property){
    return meRecord.valueForProperty(propertyToObjCType[property])
}

function getEmailByLabel(inputLabel){
    emails = valueForProperty('email')
    label = labelToObjCType[inputLabel]
    for (var i = 0; i < emails.count; i++){
        if ($.CFEqual(emails.labelAtIndex(i), label)){
            return emails.valueAtIndex(i)
        }
    }

}

function getAddressByLabel(inputLabel){
    addresses = valueForProperty('address')
    label = labelToObjCType[inputLabel]
    for (var i = 0; i < addresses.count; i++){
        if ($.CFEqual(addresses.labelAtIndex(i), label)){
            return sAB.formattedAddressFromDictionary(addresses.valueAtIndex(i)).string
        }
    }

}

function getPhoneByLabel(inputLabel){
    phone = valueForProperty('phone')
    label = labelToObjCType[inputLabel]
    for (var i = 0; i < phone.count; i++){
        if ($.CFEqual(phone.labelAtIndex(i), label)){
            return phone.valueAtIndex(i)
        }
    }

}

The biggest thing to point out is that if you have a method called in Objective-C like [ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook];, this gets converted to dot notation $.ABAddressBook.sharedAddressBook. The Obj-C bridge is always called with either ObjC. or $. followed by the method.

You can find a nice list of different properties and values for the address book here. For labels, the most common will be $.kABHomeLabel and $.kABWorkLabel for home and work respectively. If you've created a custom label (let's call it XXX), you can reference it by calling $.kABXXXLabel.

As with any other JavaScript snippet in TextExpander, you can call any of these functions to expand the contact information that you'd like.

getEmailByLabel('home')  // returns your home phone number

getAddressByLabel('work')  // returns your work address

getAddressByLabel('iPhone')  // returns your phone number labeled iPhone

For those of you who don't like copy/pasting the same code over and over, there's a nice little hack that you can do in TextExpander.

First, create a new Plain Text snippet with the code from the top of the post. I called the snippet "getInfoFromContacts". Once that's done, you can create new snippets that take advantage of this code by creating new JavaScript snippets with the following:

%snippet:getInfoFromContacts%
getEmailByLabel('home')

This way, if you update something from the main part of the code, you don't have to update all of your TextExpanders.

Tags: textexpander automation javascript objectivec