Developer surprise on OSX

I had a strange bug in the OSX Address Book application: I had a rule that included all the address cards not present in any other rule.

This worked initially, but after an update, Address Book got confused and entered into an infinite cycle (it was probably trying to ignore the cards in the rule itself and then went on to resolve that recursively).

Anyhow, the good thing was the application crashed only if I scrolled on top of that particular rule. And since I had quite a lot, I was safe to open the application at least.

But, still, having a semi-buggy application isn't fun to use. So I went and looked at the Address Book file format which seemed to be some sqlite3 database, but I couldn't fix the problem from there.

To my surprise Apple has a public API for the Address Book !

So I wrote these short lines of code:

    ABAddressBook *AB = [ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook];
    
    NSArray * groups = [AB groups];
    
    for(int i=0;i<[groups count];i++){
        ABGroup * group = [groups objectAtIndex:i];
        NSString * name = [group valueForProperty: kABGroupNameProperty];
        
        if([@"BadBadRule" compare:name]==NSOrderedSame){
            [AB removeRecord:group];
            [AB save];
        }
    }

and that was it ! No more Address Book crashes ! Turns out OSX is really nice to tweak if you are willing to code a bit.