What's the correct way to put a birthdate into a contact data?

Question

Background

I'm trying to update contacts data and put there the birthdate of each.

The problem

It seems that for each device I try (and I didn't even try that many devices), the insertion has one or more of those issues:

• when viewing/editing the contact, the brithdate can't be clicked and edited.
• when viewing/editing the contact, the format that's shown isn't the same as the one that's shown when the user puts the birthdate
• Missing year, or totally wrong year.
• when viewing the contact, the birthdate isn't shown, yet when editing it, it is shown. Also, the opposite.

What I've tried

I've tried using a timestamp and a full ISO8601 format (because of this link, meaning it's "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"). I've also tried "yyyy-MM-dd" and I tried using the default format of the date of the device.

All had the mentioned issues (at least one for each).

Here's a piece of the code:

final Date birthdate = ...
// String birthdateStr = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").format(birthdate);
// String birthdateStr = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss", Locale.getDefault()).format(birthdate);
// String birthdateStr = new SimpleDateFormat(((SimpleDateFormat) java.text.DateFormat.getDateInstance(java.text.DateFormat.DEFAULT, Locale.getDefault())).toLocalizedPattern(),Locale.getDefault()).format(birthdate);


String birthdateStr = Long.toString(birthdate.getTime()/1000);
final Builder builder = ContentProviderOperation.newInsert(ContactsContract.Data.CONTENT_URI);
builder.withValue(Data.RAW_CONTACT_ID, ...)
       .withValue(ContactsContract.Data.MIMETYPE, Event.CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE)
       .withValue(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.START_DATE, birthdateStr)
       .withValue(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.TYPE,
                    ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.TYPE_BIRTHDAY);

Of course, I've also looked on this issue here, and found similar issues, but none of the proposed solutions seem to work well.

The question

How should I really insert a birthdate into the contacts? How come each device has its own way to interpret the dates? What's the correct standard to put the birthdate ?

Answer 1

Based on this answer, I would say that you should use the format YYYY-MM-DD, but you need to define a account type and account name. So add those lines:

.withValue(ContactsContract.RawContacts.ACCOUNT_TYPE, null)
.withValue(ContactsContract.RawContacts.ACCOUNT_NAME, null)

Let me know if this helps.