Important Contact DB Tables:
This article describes few of the important tables of Contact Application Database- raw_contacts, contacts and data. Following section will describe usage of few of the important columns of these tables-
raw_contacts- stores entries for all contacts. So if you have 100 contacts, there will be 100 records in this table. For the purpose of data normalization and reduce data redundancy, this table stores basic contacts details and foreign keys of other tables (e.g. contacts tables) which in turn stores particular contact details like count of links, whether contact has email id etc.
Column Name | Purpose |
Id | unique ID for each Contact |
display_name | Contact name (first and last name are clubbed together) |
display_name_reverse | |
account_type | Source of the account- SIM, Phone, Google, T-Mobile etc. There can be one entry for the owner profile vnd.sec.contact.my_profile |
contact_id | Foreign key for contacts table. This field is important when contacts are linked. |
Contacts- this table is directly referred while creating Contact List. If a contact is linked with another, its entry will be deleted from this table and will not be displayed in the Contact List.
Column Name | Purpose |
Id | unique ID for each Contact |
display_name | Contact name (first and last name are clubbed together). Same as raw_contacts table |
display_name_reverse | |
link_type1 | Same as account_type of raw_contacts |
link_count | How many contacts are linked to this contact |
has_email | Probably it helps to quickly check whether a contact has email id rather than reading entry from data table. |
Data- this table stores all possible contact details e.g. multiple phone numbers, emails, icons, birthday, company name etc.
Column Name | Purpose |
mimetype | Type of data. 5- display name, 6-phone _number, 1- email, 7-contact icon etc. |
raw_contact_id | Foreign key for contacts table. This field is important to find out primary entries of a particular contact |
data1 | Stores contact details row wise. So for 3 details e.g. |
data2 | |
data3 | |
data15 | Stores contacts icons in binary format (PNG) |
Important Contact URI and Sample Usage
content://com.android.contacts/raw_contacts_with_photo
Authority: com.android.contacts (It identifies the ContactsProvider class. So in all URI it will be a constant part.)
Authority Information defined in ContactsProvider Manifest-
<provider android:name="ContactsProvider2"
android:authorities="contacts;com.android.contacts"
../>
Path: raw_contacts_with_photo
Following is a list of important URI to access 3 different tables of Contact Application i.e. contacts, raw_contacts and data-
content://com.android.contacts/contacts
content://com.android.contacts/contacts/#
content://com.android.contacts/contacts/#/data
Accessing Raw_Contacts Table
content://com.android.contacts/raw_contacts
content://com.android.contacts/raw_contacts/#
content://com.android.contacts/raw_contacts/#/data
Accessing Data Table
content://com.android.contacts/data
content://com.android.contacts/data/#
content://com.android.contacts/data/phones
content://com.android.contacts/data/phones/#