Question

I am currently trying to access my database using my android phone however it doesn’t work. It does work on the emulator. So I was wondering if I need to copy the data into my phone’s internal memory by using

try{
    InputStream myInput = myContext.getAssets().open(DB_NAME);

    // Path to the just created empty db
    String outFileName = DB_PATH + DB_NAME;

    //Open the empty db as the output stream
    OutputStream myOutput = new FileOutputStream(outFileName);

    //transfer bytes from the inputfile to the outputfile
    byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
    int length;
    while ((length = myInput.read(buffer))>0){
        myOutput.write(buffer, 0, length);
    }

    //Close the streams
    myOutput.flush();
    myOutput.close();
    myInput.close();
    }catch(SQLiteException e){

Another issue is that I did not use “SQLiteOpenHelper”, so does the above method still work? I simply did a

   private final String DB_NAME = "MemberData";
private final String TABLE_NAME = "MemberDB";    
sampleDB =  this.openOrCreateDatabase(DB_NAME, MODE_PRIVATE, null);
        Cursor c = sampleDB.rawQuery("SELECT companyNameEng FROM " +
                TABLE_NAME + " ORDER BY companyNameEng ASC", null);

Answer 1

Yes, you must copy the db file out of the apk and into your apps database directory (or somewhere else that your app can access). The assets directory is not really a directory when the .apk file is created… it’s just data that certain functions in the framework (getAssets()) know how to access. To allow other functions that expect a real path to work, you need to copy the data out to a proper directory on the device.

The usual destination for a database is “data/data/your.package.name/databases/”.

Your method looks like will work fine… it is standard java io. SQLiteOpenHelper is more for helping you do upgrades and create new dbs. I always use one (never know if I’m going to change how I do things even if I don’t need it initially), but you certainly don’t have to.