Automagic Forum

The new Init Variable Contact Info action does a partial search of a name, not an exact match.

When I do a search for "Emily", it finds and returns "Emily" and "Emily W"

To reproduce this error, create contact names "Emily" and "Emily W" in Google Contacts. Then run the Init Variable Contact Info action with search type NAME and search value "Emily" without the double quotes.

In a script, put these lines:
============================
contact_var=toJSON(contact_info);
contactdata_var=fromJSON(contact_var);
============================

contactdata_var contains only the last search result "Emily W".

Is this by design or is it a bug ?? Does Init Variable Contact Info do a partial match or an exact match ??

If it is by design, then contactdata_var should be a map or list, and it should have both "Emily" and "Emily W". But, I only see "Emily W". Is my script right? If it is a map/list, then I have to do an extra processing to extract "Emily" only?

If it is a bug, then I would expect an exact match and the only result "Emily". I prefer that it does an exact match. Or have the option for exact or partial.

Hi,

It's by design that it finds contacts with a partial match but I see that the design is not optimal .
I can add a new option that will only return the result when the display name matches the specified value exactly and change the logic of the current option (Name) to prefer contacts where the display name matches the input exactly.

Thanks for reporting!

Regards,
Martin

Thanks Martin. I see that the next EAP 1.34.0-dev will have exact match on search by name.

But I also wonder how the search by contact id works ??
How do we know what the id is ?? because the "Init Variable Contact List" action only lists the display_name in the supplied variable contact_list.
It does not have the option to list the contact ids ... (I don't think the id is shown in the JSON format either)

I think that the "Init Variable Contact List" action should have an option to list the contact id in the contact_list variable. That way, it ensures that the results are "unique". I want to be able to search all my friends group, have their ids, and then do a loop to process and retrieve the information of each friend.

Can we have the contact id option in "Init Variable Contact List" ?

You can use the [...]-button in the action to create a proper to select the contact ID. Actually when thinking about it, it's not named properly since I actually meant to read the entire contact information when the URI of the contact is known. The URI can come from different sources like a result URI when picking a contact (e.g. when using the [...]-button or by using action Start Activity to pick the contact). I'll add a note to rename this option.

Regards,
Martin