Create an empty ABAddressBook in iPhone SDK?

Can I create an ABAddressBook which does not read data from my address book. i.e. it's empty to start with so that I can put in my own contacts fetched from the internet.

As you may know the function

ABAddressBookRef ab = ABAddressBookCreate(); 

gives me data from the built in addressbook. This is not what I want but if y开发者_JAVA技巧ou know a solution to my problem please let me know.

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I don't think it is possible to have an empty instance of ABAddressBook. The documentation is only about getting an ABAddressBook filled with the address book of the iPhone.

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You could try making an array (or mutablearray) that you fill with the contacts and put the array inside a UITableView.

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I've been working on a "private contacts" app which stores contacts off of the normal address book and I can confirm that this is indeed possible, if only through a little manipulation. Using the ABAddressBookRef variable, however, won't help you at all. What you need is a NSMutableArray of ABRecordRef's, which is how iOS stores its contacts.

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You could try to zero out ABAddressBookRef with a memset/calloc and see if that gives you the desired result.