Read the Tea Leaves Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

For the impatient: skip the article, download the code.

Recently, when writing a physician directory for the Canton of Geneva, I wanted to include a feature for adding a new contact. That is, I wanted a button that would pop up the “Add a new contact” screen, with various fields (such as phone number, postal address, and email address) already filled in. Piece of cake, right?

Adding a contact in the physicians app.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the Android docs and Stack Overflow are pretty bereft of clear, concise instructions for creating a contact with multiple fields of various types, e.g. work phone, mobile phone, or home fax (if such a thing still exists).

Plus, the entire ContactsContract changed in API level 11 (Honeycomb), meaning that anything written for ICS or Jelly Bean wouldn’t work in Gingerbread, and vice-versa. Oh joy.

Luckily for you — assuming you stumbled across this post after a frustrated trip to Google — I’ve written a helper class to do all the heavy lifting. It provides a simple, fluent API that works for Android version 2.1 (Eclair) through 4.2 (Jelly Bean), and it’s open source.

You create a contact like this:

Intent intent = new AddContactIntentBuilder("Joe Blow")
    .addFormattedAddress("123 Fake Street, Springfield USA",
        StructuredPostal.TYPE_HOME)
    .addPhone("555-867-5309", Phone.TYPE_HOME)
    .addPhone("555-123-4567", Phone.TYPE_WORK)
    .addPhone("555-987-6543", Phone.TYPE_FAX_WORK)
    .addEmail("joe.blow@gmail.com", Email.TYPE_HOME)
    .addEmail("joe@blow.com", Email.TYPE_WORK)
    .build();

startActivity(intent);

And here’s what this code produces, in both Jelly Bean and Gingerbread:

Adding a contact in Jelly Bean and Gingerbread.

Happy contact creating!

Download or fork the code from GitHub.