Re: [Proposal] New EUDC backend for macOS address book

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3802 bytes --]

It's been a while since I tried it myself (my macbook pro finally died
early last year), but when I last tried it, going through applescript was
quite slow. In your experience with shelling out to osascript, did you find
the performance acceptable for interactive work?

Separately, over my years in (what's now) macOS, I found that Apple would
periodically update its file names, but rarely break file-level
compatability in significant ways, so it might be sufficient for
eudcb-mab.el to look through a short list of paths for the most recent
existant file. I had a (pretty simple) script that used Mail.app's SQLite
files that did this over ~5 versions, and never had any trouble with it.

Hope that helps,
~Chad


On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 8:11 AM Alexander Adolf <
alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com> wrote:

> Dear Emacs Developers,
>
> I am in the process of migrating my email workflow to `notmuch-mode'
> within Emacs. While `notmuch-mode' provides a completion backend for
> `company-mode' to get auto-completion for email addresses from your
> notmuch email archive, I was looking for a way to give me
> auto-completion for email addresses from my macOS address book, too.
>
> My research lead me to EUDC [1], and its `eudcb-mab.el', but which
> didn't work out of the box for me. Looking at the code, it turns out
> that `eudcb-mab.el' accesses the SQLite file used by macOS address book
> to store a local copy of the contacts, and reverse-engineers its
> contents. This is however not documented by Apple as an "official" way
> of accessing that data, and in fact Apple had recently changed the file
> name of the SQLite. This broke `eudcb-mab.el' for me, as it was still
> looking for the old file name. Also, since it is an undocumented file,
> Apple may choose to not only change the file name, but also its inner
> structure at any point.
>
> [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eudc.html
>
> On the other hand, there is an Apple officially documented, and endorsed
> way of accessing the macOS address book contacts, and this is via
> AppleScript [2]. Being a published and documented API, it can probably
> be expected to remain stable, and invariant towards any redesigns of the
> macOS address book app that Apple may choose to undertake in the
> foreseeable future.
>
> [2]
> https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptLangGuide/introduction/ASLR_intro.html
>
> I hence set out to write a new backend for EUDC to get access to macOS
> address book contacts via AppleScript. The result is
> `eudcb-macos-contacts.el', which is enclosed with this message, and
> which I would kindly like to propose for inclusion as part of EUDC (and
> replacing the existing `eudcb-mab.el').
>
> Yes, I have duly signed the copyright assignment (rt.gnu.org #1503473).
>
> In my implementation, I found that - interestingly - there is an elisp
> function in Emacs core, cunningly called `do_applescript()', and which
> is intended to execute AppleScript on the macOS platform from within
> Emacs. Unfortunately, I did find some oddities with it (see debbugs
> #39890 [3]), but couldn't discern whether the cause was in
> `do_applescript()' itself (so a fix could have been proposed), or in the
> Apple library code it builds upon. I hence decided to instead use
> `call-process()' to invoke the osascript [4] command line utility, which
> ships as part of every macOS. This does work reliably for me, and yields
> a more graceful overall behaviour of Emacs during large queries (again
> see debbugs #39890 [3]).
>
> [3] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=39890
> [4] https://ss64.com/osx/osascript.html
>
>
> Many thanks in advance for your considerations, and looking forward to
> your thoughts,
>
>   --alexander
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4964 bytes --]