Question

I am wondering how to best implement a read-only ContentProvider.
I want my data source to be modified only from within my own application through additional special methods of my ContentProvider (which of course are not accessible through a ContentResolver).
In other words, other applications should only be able to use my ContentProvider’s query method but not insert, delete, or update.

The obvious solution seems to be to just return null/0/0 and do nothing else in insert/delete/update. Would it be better to always throw an Exception in these methods instead so as to communicate clearly that these operations are not allowed? Or is there even a possibility of restricting the access to the ContentProvider to the query method only via permissions?

Answer 1

One method to accomplish this is via security permissions which you can access at this link in the ContentProvider paragraph. Specifically, you would set a writePermission on your provider in your AndroidManifest xml file.

If you do not wish to use security permissions, however, you can use the approaches mentioned in your second paragraph. I would suggest throwing exceptions so that it is clear that those particular insert/update/delete features can’t be accessed.