Collecting Contacts Using Cardmagic-Contacts Pplug-in in Rails 2.3.8

Cardmagic-Contacts is a rails plug-in which provides an interface to fetch contact list information from various email providers including Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, Plaxo, Yahoo and many more.

This example narrates how to extract contact list using Rails 2.3.8 and cardmagic-contacts plug-in

Step#1

• Download the plug-in by running the command below to store the plug-in in the folder “vendor/plug-ins”

Windows

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/cardmagic/contacts

Linux

ruby script/plugin http://github.com/cardmagic/contacts

Step#2

• Write down the following code on the top of the controller class

require 'contacts'

Step#3

• Pass the required gmail/yahoo/hotmail/AOL login & password from view

<div>
 
<div style="margin-left:25px;" >Invite <img src="../images/yahoo.JPG">Yahoo
 
Friends </div>
 
<div style="margin-left:25px;">Yahoo Email: <input type="text" name="email"
 
id="yahoo_email_id"></div>
<div style="margin-left:25px;">Password:   <input type="password"
 
name="email"  id="yahoo_pwd_id"></div>
 
<div style="margin-left:122px;margin-top:20px;"><input type="button"
 
value="Login" name="btn_submit" id="btn_submit" ></div>
 
</div>

Step#4

• Create an action to fetch the list of contacts for a specific email id

def grab_contacts #Grab gmail contacts @gmail_contacts=Contacts::Gmail.new(login, password).contacts #or @gmail_contacts=Contacts.new(:gmail, login, password).contacts #Grab yahoo contacts @yahoo_contacts = Contacts::Yahoo.new(login, password).contacts #or @yahoo_contacts = Contacts.new(:yahoo, login, password).contacts #Grab hotmail contacts @hotmail_contacts =Contacts::Hotmail.new(login, password).contacts #or @hotmail_contacts = Contacts.new(:hotmail, login, password).contacts end

Step#5

• Here is also alternate method to get the contacts by providing  email_id and password

any_mail = Contacts.guess(login, password).contacts

The “Contacts.guess” method will automatically concatenate the entire
address book from each of the successful logins. If the login and password is
working with multiple email accounts then it will grab the contacts from all accounts.

Step#6

• Display the friends list in your view page

<table>
<th>
<td >Friends Name</td>
<td >Friends Email</td>
</th>
<tr>
<% @gmail_contacts.each do |contact| %>
<td><%=contact[0]%></td>
<td><%=contact[1]%></td>
<% end %>
</tr>
</table>