In this chapter, we expanded upon our knowledge of content providers by mastering the most widely used content provider available to every application across every device – the Contacts content provider. We started off by taking a look at the schema of the Contacts content provider, which has grown increasingly complex as the amount of metadata associated with a given contact has soared thanks to various social networking sources. In order to solve this problem, the team at Google decided to switch up the schema by having a first-tier table simply known as the Contacts table, followed by a second-tier of tables known as the Raw Contact tables, and then by a third-tier of tables simply known as the Data tables. Each contact is then an aggregation of a group of raw contacts that are specific to a source (that is, Facebook or Twitter), and each raw contact is then an aggregation of a series of Data tables, each having its own type of data (that is, phone numbers or e-mails).

Afterwards, we looked at multiple ways to query the Contacts content provider as well as multiple ways to insert and update existing contacts in the content provider. This proved to be relatively straightforward code-wise (extremely similar to what we saw in previous chapters) and again, showed us how half the battle is just in understanding the schema and making sure we include all the proper fields.

Now, so far in this book, we've looked at ways to query your own as well as external databases, but each time we've relied on simple system print statements to actually see the results of our queries (by now I'm sure you're sick of seeing DDMS logs too). So the question becomes – now that I know how to actually build and query databases, how do I design Activities which allow me to bind this data to the UI for the user to see and interact with? This is what we'll focus on in the next chapter as we explore ways to bind and interact with our databases through the user interface.