Modifying contact information
The Android people need to update their documentation. It actually served to make me know less about what was happening than I would have gotten from guessing. It suggests that you can pull back a Contact
, which will contain many RawContacts
which will contain Data
.
That interpretation is completely wrong. ContactContracts data is instead three normal average everyday database tables*:
ContactContract Tables
Table: Contacts
Access URI:
Contacts.CONTENT_URI
Primary Key**:
Data._ID
Description:
This table contains information about a Contact (when was it added, what's is it's user icon, does it have a custom ringtone).
Relationship: It has a 1-to-many relationship with the
RawContact
table.
Table: RawContacts
Access URI:
RawContacts.CONTENT_URI
Primary Key:
Data._ID
Foreign Key**:
Data.CONTACT_ID
Description:
This table contains information about a related set of Data items. A RawContact could contain Email Type, Email Display Name, Phone Number, Phone Display Name, etc. A RawContact can be aggregated with other RawContacts to make a
Contact
as a user sees it. A Contact could contain just one RawContact.Relationship: It has a 1-to-many relationship with the
Data
table.
Table: Data
Access URI:
Data.CONTENT_URI
Primary Key:
Data._ID
Foreign Key:
Data.RAW_CONTACT_ID
Description:
This table contains a single field of information. An email address, A phone number, A phone number type (home/work), A nickname, A display name.
In answer to the question
I've uploaded the entire sample project to GitHub in order to allow others to see how to query, update and insert records using ContactContract.
You can find the project to download here: https://github.com/gwoodhouse/ContactContractSample
If you just want to look at the java code performing the query/update/insert here is the class file: https://github.com/gwoodhouse/ContactContractSample/blob/master/ContactsIntegration/src/com/woodhouse/example/activity/ContactsIntegrationActivity.java
Hope this helps!
*Not a table, but a ContentProvider
** not strictly true.