Is there a way to access AddressBook db file programmatically?

Question

i need to copy this database file and save it in someother location or i can take backup of the db file. is there a way to do this programmatically.

Thanks Satish

Answer 1

Unless you've jailbroken your iPhone, there's no way of accessing the sqlite3 database directly on the phone.

If you're talking about getting access to the database from your computer, you can do it by grabbing the database files out of the iPhone backup files. To do that, you'll need to grab a copy of Erica Sadun's mdhelper (binary file) command line utility, and run it from the PC you sync your laptop with like so:

mdhelper -files "AddressBook.sqlitedb" -extract -glob

This will create a "~/Desktop/Recovered iPhone Files" directory containing a file called AddressBook.sqlitedb, which you can access directly or query using your programming language of choice.

If you don't trust downloading and running binary files without knowing what they do, you can look at the source on Github and compile it yourself.

Answer 2

the SQL database can be extracted from an iphone backup. I used this software to grab mine and the SMS database. If you have lots of images/videos in camera roll it can take a while to run.

http://www.supercrazyawesome.com/

• porg: I tried "iPhone Backup Extractor" from that URL, and it properly converts the iPhone / iPod Touch backups that are created by iTunes (cryptic bunch of UID filenames without suffixes) into properly named Mac OS X files, which make a lot more sense to analyze.

Answer 3

Yeah sorry abt that. ok thanks probably i will create a new database using AddressBook Apis

-Satish

Answer 4

You can also take a backup of your iphone and than use one of tools discribed here to identify the file you need.