Building an Address Book > The Contact Class

The Contact Class

The Contact class is a container for properties. By using this container, we can neatly store information about people in the address book. Each Contact object has the following properties:

  firstName    The person's first name.
  lastName     The person's last name.
  email        The person's email address.
  phone        The person's phone number.
  phonetype    The type of phone number (home: 0, work: 1, cell: 2).
  company      The person's place of business.
  comments     Arbitrary notes associated with the person.
  id           A unique id by with to identify the contact record.
  dateAdded    Creation time of the contact record.

For simplicity, the Contact class does not provide any methods to access the properties of its objects. Properties are directly retrieved and set. The entire class consists of a series of property assignments in the Contact constructor. The constructor's arguments supply most of the property values associated with each Contact object. Arguments are checked for validity as follows:

  // If the argument is a string, assign it to the firstName
  // property. Otherwise, assign the empty string as the value
  // of the firstName property.
  this.firstName = (typeof firstName == "string") ? firstName : "";

The constructor also assigns a dateAdded property that stores a Date object representing the current time.

The Contact constructor is called only by the ContactManager's addContact() method.

The complete listing for Contact class is shown below.

/* =================
 * Class constructor
 * =================
 *   Desc: The Contact constructor is not called directly by the
 *         user, but by the addContact() method of the ContactManager class.
 *   Parameters:
 *     firstName    The person's first name.
 *     lastName     The person's last name.
 *     email        The person's email address.
 *     phone        The person's phone number.
 *     phonetype    The type of phone number (home, work, cell)
 *     company      The person's place of business.
 *     comments     Arbitrary notes associated with the person.
 *     id           A unique id by with to identify the contact record.
 * =================
 */
function Contact (firstName, 
                  lastName,
                  email, 
                  phone, 
                  phonetype, 
                  company, 
                  comments, 
                  id) {
  // Assign user-defined parameters to corresponding properties.
  this.firstName = (typeof firstName == "string") ? firstName : "";
  this.lastName = (typeof lastName == "string") ? lastName : "";
  this.email = (typeof email == "string") ? email : "";
  this.phone = (typeof phone == "string") ? phone : "";
  this.phonetype = (typeof phone == "string") ? phonetype : "";
  this.company = (typeof phone == "string") ? company : "";
  this.comments = (typeof phone == "string") ? comments : "";
  
  // Note the creation time for this contact.
  this.dateAdded = this.dateModified = new Date();
  
  // Assign the contact a unique id, provided by the addContact()
  // method of the ContactManager class.
  this.id = id;
}

Note that the Contact and the ContactManager classes are stored in separate .as files named Contact.as and ContactManager.as. These files are loaded into our address book with the #include directive as follows:

// Load data management classes
#include "Contact.as"
#include "ContactManager.as"

This code is placed on frame 1 of the scripts layer.