Question

I’d like to write an Android application which will function as a dictionary (glossary). Therefore, I need a pretty big database (I assume about 200 thousand entries).

As I am pretty new to Android programming, I have no idea how to hold such a big database. I thought the interface should be a ListView with all entries, and a search option. Furthermore I thought about holding the database itself in a file to be stored on SD card.

Could anyone please guide me?

Answer 1

Android uses SQLite so as far as I am aware you can create the *.sqlite file (and even rename it if you want) with any external tool you may use (maybe server) and once you have it have a look at android.database.sqlite

As to connecting the date to a ListView you can use an SQLiteCursor along with a CursorAdapter or the easier to implement SimpleCursorAdapter

For searching here is a quite complete guide of how to implement it:

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/search/search-dialog.html

or you can have a look at this android example that implements both sqlite and search:

http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/SearchableDictionary/index.html

Hope it helps!