Java Reference
In-Depth Information
int [] possibleSubTypes =
myContactList.getSupportedTypes(Contact.TEL);
On a device that is capable of storing only a home and a work phone number, the resulting int array
contains the type IDs
Contact.TYPE_HOME
and
Contact.TYPE_WORK
only.
Extended Fields
A
Contact
may also provide support for so-called "extended" fields. Extended fields are supported to
store device-dependent fields, where no field ID is predefined.
The IDs for extended fields are returned by the
getSupportedFields()
method of the
PIMList
interface. They are returned together with the standard fields in the same array. The method
isExtendedField()
can be used to determine whether a field is an extended field with a non-
standard ID.
When working with extended fields, two additional methods of the
PIMList
interface are of special
interest. The method
getFieldLabel()
returns a human-readable label for a given field ID. This
method allows an application to display a label for an extended field, although the meaning of the ID is
not known to the application. The method
PIMElement.getDataType()
returns one of the
PIMElement
constants
STRING
,
DATE
,
INT
,
BINARY
, or
TYPED_STRING
. This method allows
the application to figure out the correct access methods for an extended field.
Categories
Contact
s can be assigned to one or more categories using the
addToCategory()
method. The
method takes the name of the category as
String
parameter. The maximum number of categories a
contact may be assigned to can be queried using the
maxCategories()
method. A return value of -
1 means that the number of categories is not limited. A
Contact
can be removed from a category
using
removeFromCategory()
.
Please note that devices may limit the category names to those defined in the corresponding
PIMList
.
If a
Contact
is added to an invalid category an
PIMListException
is thrown.
PIMList
provides the following methods to manage categories available:
addCategory()
,
deleteCategory()
, and
getCategories()
.
ContactList
s: Creating, Updating, and Deleting
Contact
s
Now that you are familiar with the fields of the
Contact
interface, it is time to take a look at the
ContactList
interface, which encapsulates access to the persistent contact database.
The
ContactList
is derived from the
PIMList
interface, which offers the base functionality for
handling collections of PIM elements.
ContactList
provides a
createContact()
method for
creating new contacts.
When creating new contacts or modifying existing
contacts
, the
commit()
method of the Contact
interface must be called in order to make the changes persistent. Without calling commit, a new contact
will not be stored in the database.
The
PIMList
class supports a
deleteElement()
method, which takes a
PIMElement
as a
parameter, can be used to delete the specified element from the database.
The
PIMList
class also provides two methods for retrieving an enumeration: an
elements()
method that returns all elements of the database, and a second
elements()
method that gets all
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