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Google+ Productivity Technology

How Old Are My Google Contacts?

It may be a sign of old age but, I’m struggling more and more to remember how old people are. I have addressed this by having a review of my Google contact data and making sure, where I know someone’s birthday I have recorded it there.

This has the added advantage of creating a Google calendar showing me their birthdays.

I have now created a script which scans my contacts to find their birthdays, does some arithmetic to work out their age and store this in a custom field. I have set up a trigger to run this once a week.

Here is the script that I created:

function updateAges() {
var group = ContactsApp.getContactGroup(‘System Group: My Contacts’);
var contacts = group.getContacts();
for (var aContactCount in contacts) {
var aContact = contacts[aContactCount];
var arrAge = aContact.getCustomFields(‘Age’);
for (var ageCount in arrAge) {
var aAge = arrAge[ageCount];
aAge.deleteCustomField();
}
var aBirthday = aContact.getDates(ContactsApp.Field.BIRTHDAY);
if (aBirthday.length > 0) {
var strDOB = aBirthday[0].getYear() + ‘/’ + aBirthday[0].getMonth() + ‘/’ + aBirthday[0].getDay();
var intAge = Math.floor((Date.now() – Date.parse(strDOB)) / (24 * 3600 * 365.25 * 1000));
aContact.addCustomField(‘Age’, intAge)
Logger.log(‘Updated ‘ + aContact.getFullName() + ‘ to add the age ‘ + intAge)
}
}
};

You can find the code on GitHub here.

The script is nice and simple:

  • For a given group, find all of the contacts.
  • If the contact has a custom field called “Age”, delete it.
  • If the contact has a birthday recorded, work out their age.
  • Store the age in a custom field called “Age”.

Usual disclaimers apply – I’m not a coder so this may not be the “best” or most efficient code – but it works for me.

I “know” there are problems with the accuracy of the date arithmetic but it’s close enough for what I need.

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