PIM: Accessing the Personal Information Manager - Java 2 Micro Edition Application Development - page 181

The individual fields of a contact are addressed by field IDs. The field IDs are integer values which are
defined in the Contact interface. Examples for fields IDs are Contact.FORMATTED_NAME or
Contact.PUBLIC_KEY .

String-Based Data

String data is added to a Contact using the setString() method, which takes two parameters.
The first parameter is the field ID, and the second takes the string to be stored. For reading string data
fields, the method getString() is provided. This method takes the field ID to be read as a
parameter and returns the corresponding value. If the field has not been set, null is returned.

A contact containing one field, the formatted name, is created as follows:

ContactList myContacts = PIM.openContactList (PIM.READ_WRITE);
Contact myContact = myContacts.createContact();
myContact.setString(Contact.FORMATTED_NAME, "John, Smith");

Please note that a try-catch block for the PIMException is missing in the code above. We will omit
the mandatory try-catch block from all following code snippets.

A special field is the UID field. It contains an identifier that is unique for each contact. The unique
identifier is generated automatically and cannot be modified. It can be used to quickly retrieve a
particular contact.

Table 7.1 shows all field IDs that can be used to add string data to a Contact .

Table 7.1. Field ID Constants for String-based Data Defined in the Contact Interface
Field Name Description

ORG The organization name

FORMATTED_NAME The formatted name

NAME_FAMILY

The family name

NAME_GIVEN

The given name

NAME_OTHER Undefined information

NAME_PREFIX The name prefix

NAME_SUFFIX

The name suffix

NICKNAME A nickname

NOTE A note

PUBLIC_KEY The public key, such as a PGP public key

TITLE

The title

UID The contact's UID

URL A URL associated with the contact

Date-Based Data

In addition to text fields, the PIM API supports fields for storing dates, such as a person's birthday.
Similar to the setString() and getString() methods, the Contact class supports the
setDate() and getDate() methods to store and retrieve dates in a Contact . The set method
takes a field ID such as BIRTHDAY and a given Date object as parameters. The date can be retrieved
by giving the corresponding field ID to the getDate() method.

Another field containing a date is REVISION . This entry stores the date when the contact was last
modified. Setting this value is not recommended because it is automatically done by the
implementation. BIRTHDAY and REVISION are the only date fields supported by PDAP.