Passing Parameters via URI in Android

Question

Is it possible (or recommended) to pass parameters to content providers via URIs in Android, similar to how web addresses use them? That is to say, can I use name/value pairs in content:// URIs?

For example, I have a search provider that can search based on names. I pass it a URI like this:

content://com.example.app/name/john

That would return anyone with "john" in their names, including John, Johnathon, Johnson, etc.

I want to have the option (but not requirement) to search by exact names and not find partial matches. I was thinking of doing something like this:

content://com.example.app/name/john?exact=true

That would tell the search provider to only return names that exactly match "John." But I haven't seen any other examples of parameters used like this within Android. Is there a better way? What am I missing here?

Thanks!

Answer 1

if you want to pass query parameters you can use the appendQueryParameter() method when constructing your URI

LoaderFactory.createCursorLoader(this,
                MyProvider.MY_CONTENT_URI.buildUpon().appendQueryParameter(
                        MyProvider.MY_PARAM_NAME,
                        myParamValue).build(), projection, null,
                null, null);

And then access the param value using the getQueryParameter()

String paramValue = uri.getQueryParameter(MyProvider.MY_PARAM_NAME);

Answer 2

No, as far as I have seen, any parameters get stripped from content provider urls (although I don't know why), I worked around this by adding parameters using a "/" and a certain prefix and parse them out manually, something like this:

content://com.example.app/name/john/paramexact/true