Welcome To Android Development Working With Databases Using SQ Lite

You will understand android development in general. By the end of this blog, you will be able to push yourself out of your comfort zone with clarity on the following fundamentals of android development.

1. SQLite Database for Android.
2. You will learn how to set up a database and how this all connects with PHP.
3. Android comes with a database, so it ships with the database. That’s what we mean by it’s a complete stack. In other words, it’s an entire system; it’s got everything that you need, including a database and the choice of the database.
4. Advantages of saving to local data storage

 Introduction To Databases

So let’s get started here with the first lesson in android development. We will create an application that will demonstrate everything you need to know about SQ lite.

First of all, let’s ask yourself when you’re designing an app where you would save your data, so you’re collecting names, products, and locations. Whatever it is that you’re collecting, you want to be able to save it somewhere, so your first choice might be local.

You could save things to a text file on a local directory or on the sd card, or you can save them to the SQ LITE database.

You could also think about saving your data online or maybe a hybrid of the two options so you could work with API services which are the third party open access to let companies use their data, and you can even buy or build your own API services.

Some of the other instant service databases

If you want to save your data, you can also set up a SQL server that runs online, and you can run SQL commands against it, or you might use some of the online instant service databases such as Google’s firebase or Microsoft or something from mongo dB which is all these things that are NoSQL databases.

So there are lots of options, so if you’re building an app and want to save your data, you’re probably going to come across this type of data: JSON data.

API Services

JSON works well with text files. It works with API services. It’s for transferring between different platforms and writing SQL statements ( so data can take many forms).

SQL Server

Okay, so SQL Lite is a database it’s based on sequel like the name suggests, right, and it’s the type of database that its certain things are kind of cool about it, so let’s take a look at certain things why it’s fantastic so a sequel Lite is ZERO configuration.

Advantages of saving to local data storage

A local database would give you the fastest performance that you can get, so it’s nice to have your data online, but it’s also nice to be really quick. Hence, an offline cache or an offline collection of data keeps your app working even if you’re out of cell phone service.

Local storage can be maybe just a subset of the entire collection of data that you need, so I think that may be an excellent example of this is google maps I’ve noticed that when we are out of cell service, sometimes you can still search for some areas of the country.

The third advantage is autocompleting data entry.

What is SQ Lite

SQ lite is a database like you would expect in Microsoft access. It’s a single file. It’s a text file that’s encoded in some binary format. It’s not a large-scale thing. It’s meant for one user, so all things are simplified, SQ lite is embedded, and there’s no installation required you don’t have to go ask for any new libraries. It’s part of the android system. It’s acid compliant, which means that you won’t corrupt your data if something goes wrong during the middle of a transaction.

If you think about the size of your database, it’s very light so that it will run quickly.

Data Types In SQ lite:

1. Null- null value.
2. Integer – signed integer, stored in 1,2,3,4,6 or 8 bytes.

First of all, you can have a null value you can put in integers that are automatically scaled so that the numbers are appropriate to the number of bits you need to represent them. 

Now that we know the data types in SQ lite, let’s have a basic understanding of a concept called the cursor.

So a cursor is pretty much a result set, so when you get a list of items back from a search query, you’re going to have a cursor that is going to be something that you can iterate through and go line by line and then print them to the screen or assign them to some other value, and so we’ll be using the cursor inside of a while loop also we’re going to work with something called content values so content values are kind of an odd thing if you haven’t seen it before it’s like an associative array or a hash map where you can put some key value in pairs.

SQ Lite database for Android

Let’s create an application in android studio that uses the SQLite database to save our data on a local database.

So the point of this tutorial where we intend on exploring the SQ Lite database for Android is for you to be able to set up a database on your android device, query it, and delete things from it.

 You basically set the layout and all the buttons in the list view through the setup, and everything sets up the classes that will manage the data. You get started now with the part where you add the layout to the application, so if you’re really good at working with layouts. You’d like to help with how these buttons are all arranged to get started.

Configure Your Project where you set the anchor points to the edge of the screen to the left side of the screen and the right side of the screen, so this is all how you work with a constrained layout, so the constraints are like springs that pull the items to the sides.

Write the Program To Process Events For Button Clicks

To see how we’re going to generate a database and make this data save to it so that the upgrade is triggered automatically, it will automatically modify their schema for their database whenever

It needs to be done, which provides for forwarding compatibility or backward compatibility.

You can easily extend from a super or from a parent class, and so we have to implement a constructor that will satisfy his parameters to switch over now to the documentation. On Android and look at SQ LITE open helper, if we scroll down here, we can see that there are three different constructors that are available, and we have to implement at least one of these

Context is a reference to the application itself, and we’ll be able to compute that in just a second-string name that refers to the name of the database that we’re going to create here thing called cursor factory. 

Conclusion

Hope this guide is helpful for those who want to figure out android development with SQL databases. This guide is for beginners who are looking for tutorials so this one makes sense. It can help you learn how to use an SQLite database in Android Studio. This tutorial shows every step of programming a demo Android application that uses an SQLite local database. You will learn how to create an SQLite local database on the Android device, configure new tables with the onCreate method, set up the columns and data types, extend the SQLiteHelper class, and more.