Does AddressBook.sqlitedb on iphone maintain a timestap column to determine which contact records have been added or modified at what time?

Is there a way to determine which contact records has been modified or added to AddressBook.sqlitedb on IPhone. I mean I want my application to read the AddressBook.sqlitedb and determine which contact records has been added or modified to the AddressBook.sqlitedb from the time I last read the database? Do they maintain some kind of time stamp field in each table which stores the add or change time of a record?

Basically my problem is that when my application is not running the user can add/modify contacts on his Iphone. Now when my application launches how will it determine what changes have taken place? I donot want to store local copy of AddressBook.sqlitedb in my application and co开发者_如何转开发mpare it with the Iphones original AddressBook.sqlitedb. There must be some smarter option to accomplish it. Please help guys.

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yes, there is a time stamp for adding or modifying.

the properties are:

NSString * const kABCreationDateProperty;
NSString * const kABModificationDateProperty;

but a better way is to use ABAddressBookRegisterExternalChangeCallback.

void ABAddressBookRegisterExternalChangeCallback (
   ABAddressBookRef addressBook,
   ABExternalChangeCallback callback,
   void *context
);

you can find more deatails here:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AddressBook/Reference/ABAddressBookRef_iPhoneOS/Reference/reference.html

hope it hepls, shani

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You can't access the sqlite DB directly unless your iPhone is jailbroken, so that's out of the question. I would imagine (I'm not sure on this) that the ABRecordID returned by ABRecordGetRecordID() is valid long-term. To store a record of a contact, you can store the ABRecordID, then look up the properties for that contact when you need it. If you have more sophisticated needs (search/sort by properties for example), you'll have to implement that yourself somehow.