Pro Android 4

Architecture of Content Providers

You now know how to explore existing content providers through Android and SQLite tools. Next, we’ll examine some of the architectural elements of content providers and how these content providers relate to other data-access abstractions in the industry.

Overall, the content-provider approach has parallels to the following industry abstractions:

• Web sites
• REST
• Web services
• Stored procedures

Each content provider on a device registers itself like a web site with a string (akin to a domain name, but called an authority). This uniquely identifiable string forms the basis of a set of URIs that this content provider can offer. This is not unlike how a web site with a domain offers a number of URLs to expose its ...