Disable notifications on a ContentProvider URI

Question

I'm looking for a way to suspend notifications on a given ContentProvider's Uri. The use case is:

1. An Activity is bound to a CursorAdapter through a CursorLoader.
2. A Service may do a lot of batch, single-row updates on a ContentProvider.
3. The CursorLoader will reload its content on every row update, as the ContentProvider notifies listeners by ContentResolver#notifyChange.

Since I cannot edit the ContentProvider, and I have no control over the batch queries execution, is there a way to suspend notifications on a Uri (in the executing Service) until all of the ContentProvider-managed queries have been executed? I need this in order to avoid the flickering caused by the continuous requerying of the CursorLoader.

Answer 1

You cannot disable this mechanism in your Service. But you should try to batch them by using ContentProviderOperations.

I've written an introductory post about ContentProviderOperations and two additional posts covering the methods withYieldAllowed() and withBackReference() respectively.

Especially the latter one should be of interest for what you've described here.

With ContentProviderOperations you can batch multiple updates and inserts. If you then call applyBatch() on your ContentResolver object the ContentProvider executes them all at once.

Now I've never used Nicolas Klein's generator but since he is a very, very proficient Android developer and works at Google, I bet that the generated code makes use of transactions and calls notifyChange() only once for the complete batch at the end.

Exactly what you need.