call contacts, choose contact to send sms to then send sms

Question

I'm looking to call the users contacts list. They will then choose a contact to send an sms to. I'm having a hard time understanding how to save the contact for use when sending the sms. Any help would be appreciated. Here is my code so far below.

package com.example.practiceapp;

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.provider.ContactsContract;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.View;

public class Dollar extends Activity {

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_dollar);
    }

    //@Override
    //public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
        //getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.activity_dollar, menu);
        //return true;
    //}

    public void contacts(View view) {
        Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_PICK, ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI);
        int PICK_CONTACT=0;
        startActivityForResult(intent, PICK_CONTACT);

}


}

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

I used Android Essentials: Using the Contact Picker

It presents a working example for selecting an email address.

The key code, after using the contact picker to get a contact ID, is this:

// query for everything email
cursor = getContentResolver().query(
        Email.CONTENT_URI, null,
        Email.CONTACT_ID + "=?",
        new String[]{id}, null);

Where id is the contact ID returned from the Contacts picker (as explained in the tutorial). To get the phone data, you will need to change this to:

// query for everything phone
cursor = getContentResolver().query(
        Phone.CONTENT_URI, null,
        Phone.CONTACT_ID + "=?",
        new String[]{id}, null);

Be aware that a contact can have multiple phone numbers, so you will have to build a second dialog to select a particular phone number.

ArrayList<String> phoneNumbers = new ArrayList<String>();
String name = "";
String number = "";
int nameIdx = cursor.getColumnIndex(Phone.DISPLAY_NAME);
int numberIdx = cursor.getColumnIndex(Phone.DATA);
// Get all phone numbers for the person
if (cursor.getCount() > 0) {
    cursor.moveToFirst();
    do {
        name = cursor.getString(nameIdx);  // get the name from the cursor
        number = cursor.getString(numberIdx); // get the phone number from the cursor
        phoneNumbers.add(number);
        Log.v(DEBUG_TAG, "Got name: " + name + " phone: "
                + number);
    } while (cursor.moveToNext());
    showPhoneNumberSelectionDialog(name,phoneNumbers);
} else {
    Log.w(DEBUG_TAG, "No results");
}

(or you can adapt the cursor reading from the above code as needed)

private void showPhoneNumberSelectionDialog(String name,
        final ArrayList<String> phoneNumbers) {
    1. Build an AlertDialog to pick a number from phoneNumbers (with'name' in the title);
    2. Send an SMS to the number
}

Building the alert dialog is not hard, but involves transforming the ArrayList into a String array. See Convert ArrayList to String []

Sending the SMS is reasonably easy. There are plenty of examples on the web.

This SO Q&A (How to read contacts on Android 2.0) is also good background, but in the end I didn't use any code from it.

call contacts, choose contact to send sms to then send sms

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