Grokking Android

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty of Android Development

Android: How to Use Two Data Sources in ListViews?

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Sometimes in our apps we have the need to link to data of other sources. You have a database of your own for your app, but some records also point to the MediaStore content provider to calendar entries or to contacts.

For all detail pages this is not much of a problem. You get the data from your database and query the external content provider for additional data based on the id or lookup uri that you stored in your database.

But what to do, if you want to show data in ListViews? Say contact pictures, event titles for multiline list elements and so on. Then it gets complicated.

From what I see, we have the following choices. Neither is fully satisfying - which is why I would like to hear how you deal with these kind of problems.

Now I would really like to hear what you think. Probably there are other options, I have overlooked. Or better ways to make one of these three options work. Please let me know in the comments, on G+ or on Twitter. Thanks!

If you are curious about the G+ discussion, have a look at my G+ announcement of this post.

Wolfram Rittmeyer lives in Germany and has been developing with Java for many years.

He has been interested in Android for quite a while and has been blogging about all kind of topics around Android.

You can find him on Google+ and Twitter.