Using contact information, accounts sync and data submission model in Android

1. Using contact information,
accounts sync and data submission
model in Android
Alexey Potapov

2. • Introduction to Contacts Provider
Structure and Sync Accounts
• Data Modification, Contacts Provider
Access and Data Consistency
• Determination changes

3. Contacts Provider Structure
• ContactsContract.Contacts
• ContactsContract.RawContacts
• ContactsContract.Data

4. ContactsContract.RawContacts
• Sources of raw contacts data
o Google
o Facebook
o etc.
• Important raw contact columns
o ACCOUNT_NAME
o ACCOUNT_TYPE

5. ContactsContract.Data
• Important raw contact columns
• Generic column names
o Data1 , … , Data16
• Type-specific column names
o CommonDataKinds.Photo
o CommonDataKinds.Email
o etc.

6. ContactsContract.Contacts
• Neither applications nor
sync adapters are allowed
to add contacts
• Contact is representation
of RawContacts
aggregation

7. Contacts Provider Metadata
• ContactsContract.RawContacts.DIRTY
• ContactsContract.RawContacts.VERSION
• ContactsContract.RawContacts.SOURCE_ID
• ContactsContract.RawContacts.DELETED
• ContactsContract.Data.DATA_VERSION

8. Contacts Provider Access and Data
Consistency
• Contacts Aggregation
• Query contacts and data
• Batch modification

9. Contacts Aggregation
ID=1
Join ID=3
ID=1 ID=1
ID=2
ID=2 ID=2
ID=3 ID=1
Separate
ID=4 ID=2

10. Query contacts and data
• Lookup Key vs. Contact ID
Uri.withAppendedPath(ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI,
String.valueOf(mId));
ContactsContract.Contacts.getLookupUri(mId, mLookupKey);
• Query entities API 11
Uri.withAppendedPath(mContactUri,
ContactsContract.Contacts.Entity.CONTENT_DIRECTORY);

11. Batch modification
• Yield points
o to prevent blocking the system
• Modification back references
o to use result of a previous operation
• Optimistic concurrency control
o modification of database without having to lock
the underlying repository

12. Determination changes
• ContentObserver
o onChange(boolean selfChange)
o onChange(boolean selfChange, Uri uri) API 16
• Check db modifications by query
o What we have?
o What we want?

13. Short example
SELECT * FROM raw_contacts
WHERE
id||‘.’||contact_id||’.’
||version
NOT IN (?)
SELECT * FROM data
WHERE
id||‘.’||data_version
NOT IN (?)
? starred, etc.

14. Questions ?
© Alexey Potapov