Contact Scratchpad & Create Contact Action Extension

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Interact's Contact Scratchpad allows you to quickly create contacts, or add properties to existing contacts, by identifying common values such as names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, URLs and more in plain text.

The Contact Scratchpad can be used directly in Interact by typing or pasting in text from the clipboard, or by using the "Create Contact" action extension accessible from the "Share" menu over any selected text in any app.

The Contact Scratchpad makes it easy to turn text from a contact page on the web, and email signature, or anything else into a rich and complete contact.

Accessing the Scratchpad in Interact

To access the Contact Scratchpad in Interact, tap the Scratchpad icon in the top right.  Type free form text, or paste in text from elsewhere in the system.  As text is entered, Interact scans for recognized values and will mark items it finds in the text in bold.  Interact recognizes many common values including phone numbers, email addresses, names, postal addresses, twitter handles and more.

For values Interact cannot recognize, tags can be used to help identify the types of values in the text. See the Scratchpad Tags article for more information on using tags.

When you are happy with the text, tap "Next" to see the values parsed and assign them to a contact.

 

Using the "Create Contact" Action Extension

Typing contact information directly into the Scratchpad is always an option, but often it's easier to start by selecting text and using the iOS "Share" menu option to send that text to the Interact "Create Contact" extension.  This is great for snippets of text like email signatures which contain multiple contact values you want to use to create a new contact or add to an existing contact and offers the same features as the Interact Scratchpad used in-app.

 

Assigning Values to a Contact

After tapping "Next" on the Scratchpad, Interact will display a preview of the values parsed from the text. Tap "Scratchpad" to return and modify the text to add or remove values.

Then select "Create new contact" to open an edit screen for to create a new contact with the values, or "Add to Existing Contact" to add values to an existing contact record.

The standard iOS Contact edit screen will then appear pre-filled with the new values, ready for further editing or additions, if necessary.  When you are happy with the result, tap "Done" to complete the creation of the new contact (or to save the changes to an existing contact, if that option was selected).