Question

I would like some advice. I’m going to be using an sqlite database that will be pulling down information from my server and then saving it in the DB then displaying it. Could someone advise me of the best way to populate the DB, should I…

1. Use a http request and return a string de-liminated with say a | and use a loop to write to the data base.

2. Use a JSON to retrieve the information and then store it in the database.

The information is going to be just text and some fields will contains links to images I want to then download (get to that later). Just wanted some advice on best practices. I have done some searches on SO and other sites but can’t find much advice. Also as a side note any examples you know of that are good for noobs 🙂

Answer 1

Based on what you write here I would pick JSON.

To core points:

• JSON is a standard format.
• Android ships with a JSON lib (org.json) making it easy to handle it (encode / decode data).
• JSON is known by a large community so you can ask questions and get them answered rather easily. With a custom format you cannot tag the question as ‘json’ here at SO… 😉

Using standard formats and libraries helps you to avoid designing and implementing this stuff yourself, which makes your software more robust.

Sometime later you might need to add more complex data to your project. By that time it will be rather straightforward to use JSON’s array and objects. With your private scheme you will have to add this capability to it and extend your parsing code. That can easily introduce subtle bugs. Or you might decide at that point that it is too hard with your custom format and decide to move over to a standard like JSON, XML, etc. At that time it costs you much more to shift over than if you start with a standard format. Consider time invested to write and test the current code and then the extra time to change to the standard format for the current system.