A generalized Rack middleware for importing contacts from major email providers.
Inspired by the popular OmniAuth, OmniContacts is a library that enables users of an application to import contacts
from their email or Facebook accounts. The email providers currently supported are Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.
OmniContacts is a Rack middleware, therefore you can use it with Rails, Sinatra and any other Rack-based framework.
OmniContacts uses the OAuth protocol to communicate with the contacts provider. Yahoo still uses OAuth 1.0, while
Facebook, Gmail and Hotmail support OAuth 2.0.
In order to use OmniContacts, it is therefore necessary to first register your application with the provider and to obtain client_id and client_secret.
Me (rubytastic) and the orginal author Diego don’t actively use this code at the moment, anyone interested in maintaining and contributing to this codebase please write me up in a personal message ( rubytastic )
I try to merge pull requests in every once and a while but this code would benefit from someone actively use and contribute to it.
There is now a new gem build out which should address many issues people had when posting on the issue tracker. Please update to the latest GEM version if you have problems before posting new issues.
Add OmniContacts as a dependency:
gem "omnicontacts"
As for OmniAuth, there is a Builder facilitating the usage of multiple contacts importers. In the case of a Rails application, the following code could be placed at config/initializers/omnicontacts.rb:
require "omnicontacts"
Rails.application.middleware.use OmniContacts::Builder do
importer :gmail, "client_id", "client_secret", {:redirect_path => "/oauth2callback", :ssl_ca_file => "/etc/ssl/certs/curl-ca-bundle.crt"}
importer :yahoo, "consumer_id", "consumer_secret", {:callback_path => "/callback"}
importer :linkedin, "consumer_id", "consumer_secret", {:redirect_path => "/oauth2callback", :state => '<long_unique_string_value>'}
importer :hotmail, "client_id", "client_secret"
importer :outlook, "app_id", "app_secret"
importer :facebook, "client_id", "client_secret"
end
Every importer expects client_id and client_secret as mandatory, while :redirect_path and :ssl_ca_file are optional (except linkedin - state arg mandatory).
Since Yahoo implements the version 1.0 of the OAuth protocol, naming is slightly different. Instead of :redirect_path you should use :callback_path as key in the hash providing the optional parameters.
While :ssl_ca_file is optional, it is highly recommended to set it on production environments for obvious security reasons.
On the other hand it makes things much easier to leave the default value for :redirect_path and :callback path, the reason of which will be clear after reading the following section.
For Gmail : Google API Console
For Yahoo : Yahoo Developer Network
For Hotmail : Microsoft Developer Network
For Outlook : Microsoft Application Registration Portal
For Facebook : Facebook Developers
For Linkedin : Linkedin Developer Network
Please go through MSDN if above Hotmail link will not work.
Outlook is a newer Microsoft API which allows to retrieve real email address instead of email_hashes when using Hotmail, it also works with all kinds of MS accounts (Office 365, Hotmail.com, Live.com, MSN.com, Outlook.com, and Passport.com).
To use the Gem you first need to redirect your users to /contacts/:importer, where :importer can be facebook, gmail, yahoo or hotmail.
No changes to config/routes.rb are needed for this step since OmniContacts will be listening on that path and redirect the user to the email provider’s website in order to authorize your app to access his contact list.
Once that is done the user will be redirected back to your application, to the path specified in :redirect_path (or :callback_path for yahoo).
If nothing is specified the default value is /contacts/:importer/callback (e.g. /contacts/yahoo/callback). This makes things simpler and you can just add the following line to config/routes.rb:
match "/contacts/:importer/callback" => "your_controller#callback"
The list of contacts can be accessed via the omnicontacts.contacts key in the environment hash and it consists of a simple array of hashes.
The following table shows which fields are supported by which provider:
| Provider | :id | :profile_picture | :name | :first_name | :last_name | :address_1 | :address_2 | :city | :region | :postcode | :country | :phone_number | :birthday | :gender | :relation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmail | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |
| X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||
| Yahoo | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| Hotmail | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| Outlook | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||
Obviously it may happen that some fields are blank even if supported by the provider in the case that the contact did not provide any information about them.
The information for the logged in user can also be accessed via ‘omnicontacts.user’ key in the environment hash. It consists of a simple hash which includes the same fields as above.
The following snippet shows how to simply print name and email of each contact, and also the the name of logged in user:
def contacts_callback
@contacts = request.env['omnicontacts.contacts']
@user = request.env['omnicontacts.user']
puts "List of contacts of #{@user[:name]} obtained from #{params[:importer]}:"
@contacts.each do |contact|
puts "Contact found: name => #{contact[:name]}, email => #{contact[:email]}"
end
end
If the user does not authorize your application to access his/her contacts list, or any other inconvenience occurs, he/she is redirected to /contacts/failure. The query string will contain a parameter named error_message which specifies why the list of contacts could not be retrieved. error_message can have one of the following values: not_authorized, timeout and internal_error.
OmniContacts supports OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 token refresh, but for both it needs to persist data between requests. OmniContacts stores access tokens in the session. If you hit the 4KB cookie storage limit you better opt for the Memcache or the Active Record storage.
Gmail requires you to register the redirect_path on their website along with your application. Make sure to use the same value present in the configuration file, or /contacts/gmail/callback if using the default. Also make sure that your full url is used including “www” if your site redirects from the root domain.
To configure the max number of contacts to download from Gmail, just add a max results parameter in your initializer:
importer :gmail, "xxx", "yyy", :max_results => 1000
Yahoo requires you to configure the Permissions your application requires. Make sure to go the Yahoo website and to select Read permission for Contacts.
Hotmail presents a “peculiar” feature. Their API returns a Contact object which does not contain an e-mail field!
However, if the contact has either name, family name or both set to null, than there is a field called name which does contain the e-mail address.
This means that it may happen that an Hotmail contact does not contain the email field.
You can enable test mode like this:
OmniContacts.integration_test.enabled = true
In this way all requests to /omnicontacts/provider will be redirected automatically to /omnicontacts/provider/callback.
The mock method allows to configure per-provider the result to return:
OmniContacts.integration_test.mock(:provider_name, :email => "[email protected]")
You can either pass a single hash or an array of hashes. If you pass a string, an error will be triggered with subsequent redirect to /contacts/failure?error_message=internal_error
You can also pass a user to fill omnicontacts.user (optional)
OmniContacts.integration_test.mock(:provider_name, {:email => "[email protected]"}, {:email => "[email protected]"})
Follows a full example of an integration test:
OmniContacts.integration_test.enabled = true
OmniContacts.integration_test.mock(:gmail, :email => "[email protected]")
visit '/contacts/gmail'
page.should have_content("[email protected]")
Since Hotmail and Facebook do not allow the usage of localhost as redirect path for the authorization step, a workaround is to use ngrok.
This is really useful when you need someone, the contacts provider in this case, to access your locally running application using a unique url.
Install ngrok, download from:
https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok
Unzip the file
unzip /place/this/is/ngrok.zip
Start your application
$ rails server
=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 4.0.4 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:3000
In a new terminal window, start the tunnel and pass the port where your application is running:
./ngrok 3000
Check the output to see something like
ngrok (Ctrl+C to quit)
Tunnel Status online
Version 1.6/1.5
Forwarding http://274101c1e.ngrok.com -> 127.0.0.1:3000
Forwarding https://274101c1e.ngrok.com -> 127.0.0.1:3000
Web Interface 127.0.0.1:4040
# Conn 0
Avg Conn Time 0.00ms
This window will show all network transaction that your locally hosted application is processing.
Ngrok will process all of the requests and responses on your localhost. Visit:
http://123456789.ngrok.com # replace 123456789 with your instance
Thanks to @sonianand11, you can find a full example of a Rails application using OmniContacts at: https://github.com/sonianand11/omnicontacts_example
As already mentioned above, a special thanks goes to @sonianand11 for implementing an example app.
Thanks also to @asmatameem for her huge contribution. She indeed added support for Facebook and for many fields which were missing before.
Copyright © 2012-2013 Diego81
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