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Using Address Book Groups as Distribution Lists

An Address Book group can be used as a distribution list. For example, a user can have a Christmas Card group of all the people he or she mails Christmas cards to. Or a user can have a book club group of all the people he or she emails book club announcements to. The Address Book framework provides you with a special feature that helps you maintain distribution lists.

If a property has multiple values, like a street address or email address, it lets the user choose one as the value that this group uses. Generally, the user will want to use the value he or she has already marked as primary. But in some cases the user might want to make an exception. For example, for coworkers, the user would want their work email addresses to be their primary email addresses. But when the user notifies some of them about a book club that happens on the weekends, he or she would want to send email to their home addresses. Each group can use a different value for each person.

To choose the value in a multivalue list that a group uses, use the ABGroup method setDistributionIdentifier:forProperty:person:. To get a group’s chosen value for a multivalue list, use the ABGroup method distributionIdentifierForProperty:person:. These procedures return the identifier for the value chosen for this group, or the identifier for the primary value if no value is chosen for the group.

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