Contact deduplication post-processor

[ghost]

The datasource.contacts returns the entire NSOrderedSet of contacts, but a few contacts are listed multiple times because of linked contacts. Is there a way to include post processors to remove these duplicates?

[adam-zethraeus]

A post processor which dedupes similar contacts is a good idea. We'd be keen to have one as a pull request if you're willing to write it. If not, could you file it as a feature request?

[NickEntin]

@csimmonsbluebook By duplicate contacts, are you referring to two contacts that are equal to each other, or two contacts referring to the same person but with different fields/attributes that should be merged into a single contact? I think including a post processor to remove one of any two contacts that are equal is very reasonable, but we might want to stay away from merging contacts from multiple sources in the framework since there are a lot of parameters that can go into the merge criteria (deciding whether two contacts refer to the same person).

[ghost]

@NickEntin The contact fields seem to already be merged, but multiple contacts still persist. For example, I have Facebook Contacts syncing, as well as Google Contacts, and that information is merged into contacts I already have on my phone. So, I did a test of Ohana and pushed my contacts to a TableViewController and a few contacts were listed multiple times. I wrote some code to print to the Xcode terminal the contact fields and when clicking on each of the duplicates, they print the same information. Thus, I think we can do as you have said and remove any contacts that are equal in a post processor.

@zethraeus I don't think I have the time at the moment to work on trying to write a pull request, so for now I will file it as a feature request.

Edit: Since I'm not a contributor I can't label the issue as a feature request myself.

[adam-zethraeus]

@csimmonsbluebook If the contacts are field-for-field equal it seems reasonable to filter them out in a provided post processor. In the near term I'm wary of writing a post processor which filters by heuristic.

Thanks for the input. :)