Working With Android Contacts

Introduction To Android Contacts

Learn to work with the Android contacts database. Basic knowledge of accessing SQLite in Android

along with using Cursors is expected. See theAndroid SQLite and Cursor Articlefor more information.

Google changed the contacts database moving from 1.x to 2.0 versions of Android. This tutorial will be

broken into 3 sections. First covering accessing contacts in Android 2.0. The second page will deal with

accessing the contacts in Android 1.6 and before. Third we'll glue it all together with a class that

abstracts specific classes for each version and a set of classes to manage the data from the contact

records.

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Querying The Android Contact Database

Retrieving Contact Details

Basic contact information stored in Contacts table with detailed information stored in individual tables for

normalization. In Android 2.0 to query the base contact records the URI to query is stored in

ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI.

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This application starts off as any other Android application. First create a ContentResolver isntance in

cr. Then use the ContentResolver instance to query the database and return a Cursor with the contacts

number table use the URI stored in the SDK variable

ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI. Use a WHERE conditional to get the

phone numbers for the specified contact.

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Email Addresses

Querying email addresses is similar to phone numbers. A query must be performed to get email

addresses from the database. Query the URI stored in

ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTENT_URI to query the email address table.

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As with the phone query the field names for the email table are also stored under

ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds. The email query is performed on the URI in

ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTENT_URI and the WHERE clause has to match the

ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTACT_ID field. Since multiple email addresses can be

stored loop through the records returned in the Cursor.

Notes

Custom notes can be attached to each contact record. As before these are stored in a separate table

and are related based on the contact ID.

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Notes are stored in the Android Contacts generic data table. When accessing specific data the WHERE

clause will need 2 conditionals. First the standard contact ID, second a MIMETYPE for the data that is

being requested. The Android SDK comes with a series of auto-generated variables that take care of

query a MIMETYPE must be added to the WHERE conditional. Also in Android 2.0 the Address record

was split into multiple fields containing different parts of the address (PO-Box, stree, city, region, postal

code). In earlier versions of the Android SDK this was a free-form string storage.

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