Room persistence library and Content provider
Last Couple of days I have been spending times on learning new Android Architecture Components . After following up some blog posts, documentation & tutorials , every components were getting clear to me . But Suddenly I realised what about our old friend Content Provider . I might sound silly , because before writing this question I have spent quite a time searching , Am I be the only one came up with this question . I hadn't got any helpful solution . Anyways here is it , if I want to build up an app with local DB , I will now obviously choose new Architecture Components (live data , view model , room ) without any farther thinking this will be very helpful to make app 10x robust . But If I want my DB datas accessible to other app , for instance To Widget How do I integrate Content Provider with Room ?
I had the same question by the way. And I found a sample here which answers my question. Hope it does the same with you.
In short, this is in the DAO object which would be called from Content Provider's query()
method.
/**
* Select all cheeses.
*
* @return A {@link Cursor} of all the cheeses in the table.
*/
@Query("SELECT * FROM " + Cheese.TABLE_NAME)
Cursor selectAll();
Notice how it returns Cursor
object. Other operations, you can see for yourself in more detail in the sample.
This here is choice number 3 in the answer by @CommonsWare, I think.
if I want to build up an app with local DB , I will now obviously choose new Architecture Components (live data , view model , room )
I would not use the term "obviously" there. The Architecture Components are an option, but not a requirement.
But If I want my DB datas accessible to other app , for instance To Widget How do I integrate Content Provider with Room ?
An app widget is unrelated to a ContentProvider
. IMHO very few apps should be exposing databases to third parties via ContentProvider
, and no apps should be using a ContentProvider
purely for internal purposes.
That being said, you have a few choices:
Do not use Room, at least for the tables to be exposed via the
ContentProvider
Use Room for internal purposes, but then use classic SQLite programming techniques for the
ContentProvider
, by callinggetOpenHelper()
on yourRoomDatabase
Use Room in the
ContentProvider
, writing your own code to build up aMatrixCursor
from the Room entities that you retrieve (forquery()
) or creating the entities for use with other operations (forinsert()
,update()
,delete()
, etc.)