Luca's meaningless thoughts

Querying N900 address book

by Leandro Lucarella on 2012- 07- 02 20:49 (updated on 2012- 07- 02 20:49)
tagged addressbook, binding, c, en, evolution, hacking, libebook, maemo, mobile, n900, osso, python - with 0 comment(s)

Since there is not a lot of information on how to hack Maemo's address book to find some contacts with a mobile phone number, I'll share my findings.

Since setting up an environment to cross-compile for ARM is a big hassle, I decided to write this small test program in Python, (ab)using the wonderful ctypes module to avoid compiling at all.

Here is a very small script to use the (sadly proprietary) OSSO Addressbook library:

# This function get all the names in the address book with mobile phone numbers
# and print them. The code is Python but is as similar as C as possible.
def get_all_mobiles():

    osso_ctx = osso_initialize("test_abook", "0.1", FALSE)
    osso_abook_init(argc, argv, hash(osso_ctx))

    roster = osso_abook_aggregator_get_default(NULL)
    osso_abook_waitable_run(roster, g_main_context_default(), NULL)
    contacts = osso_abook_aggregator_list_master_contacts(roster)

    for contact in glist(contacts):
        name = osso_abook_contact_get_display_name(contact)
        # Somehow hackish way to get the EVC_TEL attributes
        field = e_contact_field_id("mobile-phone")
        attrs = e_contact_get_attributes(contact, field)
        mobiles = []
        for attr in glist(attrs):
            types = e_vcard_attribute_get_param(attr, "TYPE")
            for t in glist(types):
                type = ctypes.c_char_p(t).value
                # Remove this condition to get all phone numbers
                # (not just mobile phones)
                if type == "CELL":
                    mobiles.append(e_vcard_attribute_get_value(attr))
        if mobiles:
            print name, mobiles


# Python

import sys
import ctypes
# be sure to import gtk before calling osso_abook_init()
import gtk
import osso

osso_initialize = osso.Context

# Dynamic libraries bindings
glib = ctypes.CDLL('libglib-2.0.so.0')
g_main_context_default = glib.g_main_context_default
def glist(addr):
    class _GList(ctypes.Structure):
        _fields_ = [('data', ctypes.c_void_p),
                    ('next', ctypes.c_void_p)]
    l = addr
    while l:
        l = _GList.from_address(l)
        yield l.data
        l = l.next

osso_abook = ctypes.CDLL('libosso-abook-1.0.so.0')
osso_abook_init = osso_abook.osso_abook_init
osso_abook_aggregator_get_default = osso_abook.osso_abook_aggregator_get_default
osso_abook_waitable_run = osso_abook.osso_abook_waitable_run
osso_abook_aggregator_list_master_contacts = osso_abook.osso_abook_aggregator_list_master_contacts
osso_abook_contact_get_display_name = osso_abook.osso_abook_contact_get_display_name
osso_abook_contact_get_display_name.restype = ctypes.c_char_p

ebook = ctypes.CDLL('libebook-1.2.so.5')
e_contact_field_id = ebook.e_contact_field_id
e_contact_get_attributes = ebook.e_contact_get_attributes
e_vcard_attribute_get_value = ebook.e_vcard_attribute_get_value
e_vcard_attribute_get_value.restype = ctypes.c_char_p
e_vcard_attribute_get_param = ebook.e_vcard_attribute_get_param

# argc/argv adaption
argv_type = ctypes.c_char_p * len(sys.argv)
argv = ctypes.byref(argv_type(*sys.argv))
argc = ctypes.byref(ctypes.c_int(len(sys.argv)))

# C-ish aliases
NULL = None
FALSE = False

# Run the test
get_all_mobiles()

Here are some useful links I used as reference: