How to use
How do you use it?
VisualCard provides two types of versit types:
vCard 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0
vCalendar 1.0 and 2.0
There are common classes that work on both vCard and vCalendar. They're found in VisualCard.Common. There's no need to install it manually, as it's automatically installed as a transitive dependency.
vCard 2.1 to 5.0
Just use the CardTools class found in the VisualCard namespace that contains all the necessary tools to get a list of cards from either a vCard file, a stream, or a string representation.
VisualCard officially supports the vCard 5.0 specification, which can be found here.
Available functions for obtaining cards
You can use one of the following functions to obtain cards:
GetCardsFromString()
Gets a list of card instances from a string representation of vCard.
GetCards()
Gets a list of card instances from either a file or a stream reader.
These functions return the list of cards from multiple contacts that may be detected by the vCard parser. When parsing is done, it returns an array of Card instances that hold information about the contact.
Available functions for saving cards
To save contacts, call the SaveTo() function on a Card instance that holds information about a contact you want to save. Currently, it allows you to save using one of the following methods:
SaveToString()
Saves this contact to a string representation, optionally performing validation before saving.
SaveTo()
Saves this contact to a file path
On VCard 4.0 and 5.0, ALTID is supported on all the compatible types. You can also group the properties by appending a group name and a dot before the actual property.
vCalendar 1.0 and 2.0
Additionally, VisualCard can parse calendars, but only after you've installed a separate library, called VisualCard.Calendar, that is responsible for handling calendars that are built upon the following vCalendar versions:
vCalendar 1.0
vCalendar 2.0
To parse calendars, you can use the CalendarTools class.
Available functions for obtaining calendars
You can use one of the following functions to obtain calendars:
GetCalendarsFromString()
Gets a list of calendar instances from a string representation of vCalendar.
GetCalendars()
Gets a list of calendar instances from either a file or a stream reader.
These functions return the list of calendars that may be detected by the vCalendar parser. When parsing is done, it returns an array of Calendar instances that hold information about the calendar.
Available functions for saving calendars
Just like vCards, you can also save calendars by calling the SaveTo() function on a Calendar instance that holds information about a calendar you want to save. Currently, it allows you to save using one of the following methods:
SaveToString()
Saves this calendar to a string representation, optionally performing validation before saving.
SaveTo()
Saves this calendar to a file path
You can group the properties by appending a group name and a dot before the actual property.
Clipboard support
If you're developing a clipboard manager, you may want to make it detect that it's a vCard or a vCalendar instance using the clipboard object identifier using the FPI constant variable in either CardTools or CalendarTools.
Diagnostics
You can enable logging for VisualCard by setting the EnableLogging property to true and by optionally providing the logging provider using the AbstractLogger property. To find out more about the internal workings of this feature, consult the below page:
Spec sheets
You can see the spec sheets below.
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