Android: Quickly look up a list of contacts

Question

I am currently developing an App which needs to look up a number of contacts (name and photo) via their phone number. However, this takes several seconds (For each contact: Look up the contact via their phone number, get contact's name & photo).

What would be a good strategy to speed this process up? I realize that I could use my own sqlite db which contains a list of exactly those names and photos I need. With such a database I could only do one query, then get the data for all contacts I need at once. This however would add quite some overhead I am hoping to avoid.

Is there a better (speak: simpler) solution?

Thank you.

Answer 1

you can use CursorAdapter and override bindView() method for example:

@Override
public void bindView(final View view, Context context, final Cursor cursor) {
    holder = (ItemHolder) view.getTag();
    ImageView icon = holder.getImageView();
    TextView name = holder.getName();
    final TextView email = holder.getEmail();
    icon.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.contact_icon);
    name.setText(cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME)));


    final int contactid = cursor.getInt(cursor.getColumnIndex("_id"));
    mHandler.post(new Runnable() {

        @Override
        public void run() {
            Cursor emailCursor = getContentResolver().query(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTENT_URI, null, "contact_id=?", new String[]{String.valueOf(contactid)}, null);
            startManagingCursor(emailCursor);
//          Log.i("cursor:", emailCursor.getCount()+"");
            if(emailCursor!=null){

                if(emailCursor.getCount()==0){
                    email.setText("");
                }else {
                    while(emailCursor.moveToNext()){
                        String emails = emailCursor.getString(emailCursor.getColumnIndex("data1"));
                        email.setText(emails);
                    }
                }

            }
            emailCursor.close();
        }
    });

you would use ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI instead of ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.CONTENT_URI .

Answer 2

You can use Hashmap to cache the data, run a background thread to cache the contacts data in HashMap and fetch it from hashmap when ever necessary. It will reduce query time when information is needed.

Answer 3

another example:

       ListView myListView = (ListView)findViewById(R.id.myListView);

   Cursor cur = getContentResolver().query(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI, null, null, null, null);

   startManagingCursor(cur);


   ListAdapter adapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this,
   android.R.layout.simple_list_item_2,
   cur,
   new String[]{ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.DISPLAY_NAME, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER},new int[] {android.R.id.text1, android.R.id.text2});
   myListView.setAdapter(adapter);