Android - Autocomplete with contacts
- by The Salt
I've created an AutoCompleteTextView box that displays the names of all contacts, but after looking in the Android APIs, it seems my method is probably quite inefficient.
Currently I am grabbing a cursor of the all the contacts, placing each name and each contact id into two different arrays, then passing the name array to the AutoCompleteTextView. When a user selects an item, I lookup which ID the contact selected in the second id array created above. Code below:
private ContactNames mContactData;
// Fill the autocomplete textbox
Cursor contactsCursor = grabContacts();
mContactData = new ContactNames(contactsCursor);
ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, R.layout.contact_name, mContactData.namesArray);
mNameText.setAdapter(adapter);
private class ContactNames {
private String[] namesArray;
private long[] idsArray;
private ContactNames(Cursor cur) {
namesArray = new String[cur.getCount()];
idsArray = new long[cur.getCount()];
String name;
Long contactid;
// Get column id's
int nameColumn = cur.getColumnIndex(People.NAME);
int idColumn = cur.getColumnIndex(People._ID);
int i=0;
cur.moveToFirst();
// Check that there are actually any contacts returned by the cursor
if (cur.getCount()>0){
do {
// Get the field values
name = cur.getString(nameColumn);
contactid = Long.parseLong(cur.getString(idColumn));
// Do something with the values.
namesArray[i] = name;
idsArray[i] = contactid;
i++;
} while (cur.moveToNext());
}
}
private long search(String name){
// Lookup name in the contact list that we've put in an array
int indexOfName = Arrays.binarySearch(namesArray, name);
long contact = 0;
if (indexOfName>=0)
{
contact = idsArray[indexOfName];
}
return contact;
}
}
private Cursor grabContacts(){
// Form an array specifying which columns to return.
String[] projection = new String[] {People._ID, People.NAME};
// Get the base URI for the People table in the Contacts content provider.
Uri contacts = People.CONTENT_URI;
// Make the query.
Cursor managedCursor = managedQuery(contacts, projection, null, null, People.NAME + " ASC"); // Put the results in ascending order by name
startManagingCursor(managedCursor);
return managedCursor;
}
There must be a better way of doing this - basically I'm struggling to see how I can find which item a user selected in an AutoCompleteTextView. Any ideas?
Cheers.
