Professional Android, 4th Edition

10Content Providers and Search

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating Content Providers
• Using Content Providers to share application data
• Restricting shared data access using permissions
• Querying and performing transactions with databases using Content Providers
• Using the Content Resolver to query, add, update, and delete data stored in databases
• Asynchronously querying Content Providers using Cursor Loaders
• Using the native call log, Media Store, contacts, and calendar Content Providers
• Adding search capabilities to your applications
• Providing search suggestions to Search Views

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Snippets_ch10.zip
• Earthquake_ch10.zip

INTRODUCING CONTENT PROVIDERS

In this chapter you learn how to create and use Content Providers as a consistent way to share, and consume structured data within and between applications by providing an abstraction from the underlying data storage technique.

You see how to query Content Providers asynchronously using Cursor Loaders, to ensure your application remains responsive while you retrieve data.

In Android, access to a database is restricted to the application that created it, so Content Providers offer a standard interface your applications can use to share data with, and consume data from, other applications—including many of the native databases.

Content Providers are used extensively ...