We now turn our attention to data storage requirements; we need a way to store and retrieve Point of Interest (POI) data. This chapter covers the following topics:
Approaches to data storage solutions
Creating the POI entity class
Creating the POI data storage interface
Implementing the POI data storage service
Using Xamarin.Android unit tests to support development
Data storage solutions fall into two general categories, web services and local storage. While many real-world mobile apps rely on web services, we will focus on a local storage solution for a couple of reasons. First, it eliminates the need to maintain a hosted service for the example to work, and second, we simply do not have sufficient time to adequately deal with creating and accessing a web service solution in this book.
There are a number of solutions that can be used for storing data locally. SQLite is a lightweight transactional database engine that is delivered with the Android platform...