Book Image

Android Database Programming

By : Jason Wei
Book Image

Android Database Programming

By: Jason Wei

Overview of this book

<p>We live in an increasingly data-centric and data-driven world. On top of that we live in a very mobile-centric world with the rise of Android smart phones and tablet devices and the surge in demand for the Android platform. Along with the demand for more data, there is a demand for efficient, "snappy" applications, and so developers need to have a strong understanding of when different data storage methods are appropriate and when they are not.</p> <p>Mastering how to use these two fields to successfully create a powerful application will help you boost your knowledge and skills in this area.</p> <p>"Android Database Programming" is designed to help developers create and design data-centric mobile applications on Google’s Android platform. As the world goes increasingly mobile and as consumers’ demand for data-centric applications rises, knowing how to combine the two effectively will become an increasingly important asset to have as a developer. The book starts by looking at the various local data storage methods on Android, and finishes off by examining external databases and ways you can utilize them from within an Android application.</p> <p>This book starts by looking at local data storage methods, focusing on writing SQLite databases for your application and also looking at ways to bind these databases to the user interface. The book, through its practical approach, strives to teach you by examples. Each chapter focuses on flushing out high level design concepts, before drilling down into different code examples.&nbsp;</p> <p>As you continue you will look at external databases, primarily Google’s App Engine platform, and pull things together by helping you understand how you can request, cache, and display this data. The book then teaches the ways and techniques to utilize such external databases from within your application.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Database Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Modifying Contacts


The code for the following examples should again look very familiar. And like I said earlier, half of the challenge is just mastering the schema and understanding how each table interacts with the others (it helps to see the schema laid out like previously – otherwise it can be extremely confusing and may require browsing through a lot of verbose documentation). Let's say we want to insert a new phone number for a user. Which table's URI should we reference?

Well, it'd have to be one of the Data tables and we should probably pass in the MIMETYPE of the data so that the content provider knows exactly which of the Data tables to insert the new row in. In this case, we'll specify the phone content type and pass in a number and a number type. The only field we're missing is the ID – whose phone Data table should this new row go into? Well, recalling that each Data table points to a Raw Contact table, it would make sense to pass in the raw contact ID of the contact.

So we try...