I've just started fiddling with writing gnome-shell extensions, and would like to know how to get a list of contacts a user has.
I've tracked down some likely files: gnome-shell/js/ui/contactDisplay.js
and gnome-shell/src/shell_contact_system.c
.
Now I notice in shell_contact_system.c
the following function:
/**
* shell_contact_system_get_all:
* @self: A #ShellContactSystem
*
* Returns: (transfer none): All individuals
*/
GeeMap *
shell_contact_system_get_all (ShellContactSystem *self)
{
GeeMap *individuals;
g_return_val_if_fail (SHELL_IS_CONTACT_SYSTEM (self), NULL);
individuals = folks_individual_aggregator_get_individuals (self->priv->aggregator);
return individuals;
}
This suggests that inthe javascript interface I can use function get_all
(my belief is reinforced by the fact that the .c
file also has a shell_contact_system_get_individual
and contactDisplay.js
demonstrates the use of Shell.ContactSystem.get_default().get_individual
), so I try:
contactSys = Shell.ContactSystem.get_default();
// get contacts
contacts = contactSys.get_all();
It works! (I'm trying it out in Gnome-shell's "looking glass" javascript interpreter).
It appears to be a 'Gobject' so I have no idea what to do with this object to get the names of my contacts out. I notice (from the C code) that this object is a GeeMap *
, so looking at the documentation for Gee.Map, I see I can do the following:
contacts.size // returns 31, which is the number of contacts I have !
contacts.values // is a Gee.Collection
contacts.keys // is a Gee.Set
I then try to look at contacts.values
and contacts.key
, noting the to_array()
method these have:
contacts.values.to_array()
contacts.keys.to_array()
However when I do this I get an empty array back out: contacts.xxx.to_array().size
is 0, yet contacts.size
is 31 ?? !!
The same occurs when I attempt to use a contacts.map_iterator()
to iterate through the map; it.get_value()
and it.get_key()
appear to be null.
So, my question is: How can I access the individual elements of contacts
?
I do note that the comment for shell_contact_system_get_all
says Returns: (transfer none): ...
whilst shell_contact_system_get_individual
says Returns: (transfer full): ...
, and the latter function works (provided I know the ID of the individual I want to look up, which is my problem), whereas the former doesn't. Could this be something to do with it?
Also, as a workaround, I can currently make use of the contactSearchProvider
class to achieve this (used by the overview when you intall gnome-contacts
where you can type the name of a contact and they'll appear in the overview). I basically search for ''
which should return me a list of every contact. It seems roundabout though - I feel I should just be able to use the get_all()
method to get all the contacts without having to search on an empty string...
const ContactDisplay = imports.ui.contactDisplay;
cds = new ContactDisplay.contactSearchProvider;
res = cds.getInitialResultSet(['']);
// woohoo! res.length is 31, and res[0], res[1], ... are all not null!
Any help would be greatly appreciated (by the way, is there any sort of documentation about for this? I feel extremely inadequate when I stare at the source and try to deduce all the documentation from it!)