Question

I would like to reuse the native Contact Picker of a User’s device by doing the following:

public void doLaunchContactPicker(View view) {
    Intent contactPickerIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_PICK,
            Contacts.CONTENT_URI);

            // Made up code that I am sure doesn't exist
            contactPickerIntent.putExtra("MyRemote3rdPartyContactList", remoteContacts)

    startActivityForResult(contactPickerIntent, CONTACT_PICKER_RESULT);
}

However, instead of looking at their contacts that are on the device, I would like to re-configure the Contact UI to point at a Custom Contact Provider that I populate via webservice call in my app.

How would I go about doing this if it is possible?

Answer 1

Technically not possible: the default Contact picker doesn’t have any code to let you feed it a different data source.

If you really want you can pop open the source and poke at it: maybe you can reuse it for your purposes.