omnigroupcontacts

Inspired by the popular OmniContacts, OmniGroupContacts is a library that enables users of an application to import contacts from their email accounts with respect to group. The email providers currently supported are Gmail. OmniGroupContacts is a Rack middleware, therefore you can use it with Rails, Sinatra and any other Rack-based framework.

OmniGroupContacts uses the OAuth protocol to communicate with the contacts provider. In order to use OmniGroupContacts, it is therefore necessary to first register your application with the provider and to obtain client_id and client_secret.

Add OmniGroupContacts as a dependency:

gem "omnigroupcontacts"

As for OmniAuth, there is a Builder facilitating the usage of multiple contacts importers. In the case of a Rails application, the following code could be placed at config/initializers/omnigroupcontacts.rb:

require "omnigroupcontacts"

Rails.application.middleware.use OmniGroupContacts::Builder do
  importer :gmailgroup, "client_id", "client_secret", {:redirect_path => "/oauth2callback", :ssl_ca_file => "/etc/ssl/certs/curl-ca-bundle.crt"}
  
end

• For Gmail : Google API Console

To use the Gem you first need to redirect your users to /group_contacts/:importer, where :importer can be gmailgroup. No changes to config/routes.rb are needed for this step since omnigroupcontacts will be listening on that path and redirect the user to the email provider's website in order to authorize your app to access his contact list. Once that is done the user will be redirected back to your application, to the path specified in :redirect_path. If nothing is specified the default value is /group_contacts/:importer/callback (e.g. /group_contacts/gmailgroup/callback). This makes things simpler and you can just add the following line to config/routes.rb:

  match "/group_contacts/:importer/callback" => "your_controller#callback"

The list of contacts can be accessed via the omnigroupcontacts.contacts key in the environment hash and it consists of a simple array of hashes. The following table shows which fields are supported by which provider:

Obviously it may happen that some fields are blank even if supported by the provider in the case that the contact did not provide any information about them.

The information for the logged in user can also be accessed via 'omnigroupcontacts.user' key in the environment hash. It consists of a simple hash which includes the same fields as above.

The following snippet shows how to simply print name and email of each contact, and also the the name of logged in user:

def contacts_callback
  @contacts = request.env['omnigroupcontacts.contacts']
  @user = request.env['omnigroupcontacts.user']
  puts "List of contacts of #{@user[:name]} obtained from #{params[:importer]}:"
  @contacts.each do |group_name, contacts|
  	puts "Group: #{contacts}"
  	contacts.each do |contact|
    	puts "Contact found: name => #{contact[:name]}, email => #{contact[:email]}"
    end
  end
end

If the user does not authorize your application to access his/her contacts list, or any other inconvenience occurs, he/she is redirected to /contacts/failure. The query string will contain a parameter named error_message which specifies why the list of contacts could not be retrieved. error_message can have one of the following values: not_authorized, timeout and internal_error.

Copyright (c) 2015 Mitesh Jain

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