How to: Search for a Contact and get Contact Picture in Windows Phone

published on: 8/5/2011 | Views: N/A | Tags: Mango

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this post I am going to talk about how to get Contact Picture via code in Windows Phone Mango.

Actually this is a common question that we have been asked recently, so we decided to answer it here.

Before we begin:

NOTE: Although Windows Phone Emulator contains sample contacts they do not have photos. So you should test using a physical device.

You can also take a look at our previous post: How to choose a Contact and get Contact details in a WP7 app

How to: Search for a Contact and get Contact Picture

With the Mango release you can now query the Contact List and retrieve information via the Contacts class.  Here is how we can search for the target Contact using the SearchAsync() method (Note that FilterKind determines the kind of filtering you want, it can be PhoneNumber, DisplayName, EmailAddress, etc.):

private void btnSearchContact_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    Contacts contacts = new Contacts();
    contacts.SearchCompleted += new EventHandler<ContactsSearchEventArgs>(contacts_SearchCompleted);
    contacts.SearchAsync(displayName, FilterKind.DisplayName, null);

    //search for all contacts
    //contacts.SearchAsync(string.Empty, FilterKind.None, null);
}

NOTE: While in the code snippet above, we are not using the third parameter (named "state") of the SearchAsync method, it is good to know that it can be used to pass data to the SearchCompleted handler, as the value passed in the state parameter is stored in the ContactsSearchEventArgs.

Here is how we get the actual data using the Results property of ContactsSearchEventArgs in the SearchCompleted handler. Have in mind that in some cases there are more than one e-mails, for example, so in such cases we could use FirstOrDefault() to get the first available. We will get all pictures that match the search result  using BitmapImage and the GetPicture() method. Next we will add them to the current page ContentPanel.

void contacts_SearchCompleted(object sender, ContactsSearchEventArgs e)
{
    //alternatively you could use 
    //e.Results.FirstOrDefault() or e.Results.Last() instead to get only the first/last contact info
     
    //find all pictures that match the search result
    foreach (var result in e.Results)
    {
        BitmapImage bmp = new BitmapImage();
        bmp.SetSource(result.GetPicture());
        Image img = new Image();
        img.Source = bmp;
        this.ContentPanel.Children.Add(img);
    }
}

For reference you can also take a look at the Contact class MSDN Documentation.

That was all about how to get Contact Picture via code in Windows Phone Mango. Here is the sample project:

I hope that the tip was helpful.

You can also follow us on Twitter @winphonegeek

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