Android Contact phone number using Loader Invalid column data1

Question

I used to use content resolver previously to fetch Contact list and their details while that still works I wanted to try the Loader method which queries the Content Provider in the background. I have looked at the documentation and sample code here :

http://developer.android.com/training/contacts-provider/retrieve-details.html

While I was able to display a list of Contacts without any problems, I am stuck at retrieving Phone Number of a particular contact on clicking it and showing it on a detail screen. The demo above shows address of the user on the detail screen, I even tried modifying it. I have changed the content URI from Contacts to ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone but I keep getting

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid column data1

There is not a single detailed tutorial on the internet showing how it is done. Can someone here be kind enough to shed some light? Reading various other Stackoverflow questions I am oretty sure it has something to do with the 2 different CONTENT URI but again I could be wrong. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Thanks

Few of the SO Questions I have already looked at :

Get phone number from contact loader in android: projection crash

Logcat says "invalid column data1"

How to get contacts' phone number in Android

Obtaining phone number from lookup URI

None of them solve my problem. Here is the relevant code where it fails :

     final static String[] PROJECTION = {
            Contacts._ID,
            Utils.hasHoneycomb() ? ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.DISPLAY_NAME_PRIMARY : ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.DISPLAY_NAME
           //ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER,
    };

The code works just fine, but the moment I remove the comment to fetch Phone Number it fails

Answer 1

This is an excerpt of what I actually do in my (working) code.

These are my relevant imports:

import android.provider.ContactsContract;
import android.provider.ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email;
import android.provider.ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone;
import android.provider.ContactsContract.Contacts;

Given that id is a string (representing a number, like "1", "20", ...)

// Query for phone numbers for the selected contact id
final Cursor cur = getContentResolver().query
    (
    Phone.CONTENT_URI, null,
    Phone.CONTACT_ID + "=?",
    new String[] {id}, null
    );

final int phoneIdx = cur.getColumnIndex(Phone.NUMBER);
final int phoneType = cur.getColumnIndex(Phone.TYPE);

// ...

    if(cur.moveToFirst())
    {
        final String name =
            cur.getString
            (
                cur.getColumnIndexOrThrow
                (
                    ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME
                )
            );
    }

Hope it puts you on the right path

Answer 2

In my case the problem was with URI.

I was using this:

Uri uri = ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI;

and I changed for this (Phone.CONTENT_URI) to resolve the problem and obtain the phone number:

Uri uri = ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI;

This is the rest of the code:

contactos = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.contactos);

Uri uri = ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI;

String [] projection = new String[] {
                ContactsContract.Contacts._ID,
                ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME,
                ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER
        };

Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(uri, projection, null, null, null);

while (cursor.moveToNext()){
            String nombre = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Data.DISPLAY_NAME));
            String telefono = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER));
            contactos.append("Name: ");
            contactos.append(nombre);
            contactos.append(" - Phone Number: ");
            contactos.append(telefono);
            contactos.append("\n");
        }

Answer 3

Change Your Query URI.

You are using a URI that is not meant for searching/filtering those columns (e.g. phone numbers) on Contacts:

You need to use a URI that has access to the columns you're trying to filter on, like this:

Uri uri = ContactsContract.Data.CONTENT_URI;

Or maybe this one since you're searching phone numbers:

Uri uri = ContactsContract.PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI;

There's a decent breakdown of what URIs to use and when on the Android SDK Documentation:

• If you need to read an individual contact, consider using CONTENT_LOOKUP_URI instead of CONTENT_URI.

• If you need to look up a contact by the phone number, use PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI, which is optimized for this purpose.

• If you need to look up a contact by partial name, e.g. to produce filter-as-you-type suggestions, use the CONTENT_FILTER_URI URI.

• If you need to look up a contact by some data element like email address, nickname, etc, use a query against the ContactsContract.Data table. The result will contain contact ID, name etc.