Google Apps Script - Contacts - Query on multiple strings - google-apps-script

Question

I'm working on a script to remove and re-add about 100 contacts. I have 12 different search criteria for ContactsApp.getContactsByEmailAddress, which the initiated know takes 30+ seconds to run. Is there some way I can only run it once and search all of my criteria? I've looked for others trying to do this same thing and was unsuccessful.
Below is one of the searches from my function (repeats 12 times with various search terms being passed to ContactsApp.getContactsByEmailAddress). I added the try-catch block because the script kept throwing errors out for seemingly no reason during various delete loops.
Would appreciate any and all advice.
var apa = ContactsApp.getContactsByEmailAddress('apa.')
try{
for (var i in apa) {
apa[i].deleteContact()
}
} catch(e){
Logger.log(e)
}

Answer 1

With the Contacts Service, you are limited to a single search criteria. Thus, the only way to search multiple patterns is to call the method once with each search parameter. You can, thankfully, use standard programming practices to minimize the amount of repeated code:
function getContactsWithEmails(emailSearchCriteria) {
if (!emailSearchCriteria || !emailSearchCriteria.length)
throw new Error("No search inputs given");
// Collect the results of each search into a single Array.
const matches = [];
emailSearchCriteria.forEach(function (email) {
var results = ContactsApp.getContactsByEmailAddress(email);
if (results.length)
Array.prototype.push.apply(matches, results);
else
console.log({message: "No results for search query '" + email + "'", query: email, resultsSoFar: matches});
});
return matches;
}
function deleteContacts(arrayOfContacts) {
if (!arrayOfContacts || !arrayOfContacts.length)
throw new Error("No contacts to delete");
arrayOfContacts.forEach(function (contact) {
ContactsApp.deleteContact(contact);
});
}
// Our function that uses the above helper methods to do what we want.
function doSomething() {
// Define all email searches to be performed.
const emailFragmentsToSearchWith = [
"email1",
...
"emailN"
];
const matchingContacts = getContactsWithEmails(emailFragmentsToSearchWith);
if (matchingContacts.length) {
/** do something with the contacts that matched the search.
* someMethodThatSavesContacts(matchingContacts);
* someMethodThatModifiesContacts(matchingContacts);
* deleteContacts(matchingContacts);
* ...
*/
}
/** do other stuff that doesn't need those contacts. */
}
The Google Calendar v3 GData API, as mentioned in this SO question, does support multiple query parameters. However, there is no simple integration with this API - you will need to write the appropriate URL requests and execute them with UrlFetchApp.
In addition to the Google Contacts API, you could use the Google People REST API, specifically the people.connections#list endpoint.
Both of these APIs require you to associate your Apps Script project with a Google Cloud Project that has the respective API enabled, and will likely require you to manually set the scopes your Apps Script project requires in its manifest file, in addition to providing OAuth2 authorizations of the associated HTTP requests you make to the API endpoints.
References
Accessing External APIs
Enabling Google APIs (steps 3-5)
Google Contacts API v3
Google People API
Array#forEach