Question

I am trying to build a mailto: uri to send a mail using the GMail app.
I would like to use the android.net.Uri.Builder class to do this, but the resulting uri is in the form mailto://[e-mail], which makes the GMail app think the recipient is //[e-mail], instead of just [e-mail].

I ended up doing this:

String uriStr = uriBuilder.toString();
uriStr = uriStr.replaceAll("//", "");
final Uri uri = Uri.parse(uriStr);

but clearly, this is an ugly hack…

Is there no way to build the uri without the // part?

Answer 1

There are several issues here. While it is possible to get rid of the // part, you will loose the query strings then. The main problem is that Uri.Builder won’t let you use queries with opaque URIs (an opaque URI is an absolute URI whose scheme-specific part does not begin with a slash character, like mailto: URIs).

That said, you should use uriBuilder.opaquePart() instead of uriBuilder.authority() because the latter implicitly sets your URI to hierarchical, i.e. non-opaque. This will get rid of the //, but you’re lacking the query part then, and you cannot set it, because any call to uriBuilder.appendQueryParameter() also implies a hierarchical URI.

Long story short, to construct an opaque mailto: URI that includes queries, you’ll have to use

Uri uri = Uri.parse("mailto:[e-mail]?subject=title&body=text");

instead. Of course, the literal title and text should be Uri.encode()ed.