Question

I’m trying to create a list adapter that pulls in and displays data from a database. From what I can tell, it is pulling in the info, but it fails when I try to create the ListAdapter from the new Simple cursor adapter. Not sure what I’m doing wrong here.

SQLiteDatabase db = myDbHelper.getReadableDatabase();
String select = "Select StateID, State, Details from States";            
Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(select, null);

startManagingCursor(cursor);
ListAdapter adapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this,
    android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1,
    cursor,
    new String[]{"State"},
    new int[]{android.R.id.text1});

setListAdapter(adapter);

Part two will be figuring out how to assign StateID as a row id in the list so that I can access it when someone clicks on a state, but so that it’s not visible.

Answer 1

It really helps if you would use adb logcat, DDMS, or the DDMS perspective in Eclipse to look at the stack trace associated with a crash. Otherwise, we have no idea what it means when you say it “fails”.

However, there is one major flaw I can see just from a code inspection: you need a column named _ID to be able to use SimpleCursorAdapter. _ID needs to be unique and a Java long (INTEGER in SQLite).

Ideally, you replace StateID with _ID. In that case, your “Part two” is solved, in that the row’s ID is your _ID value. For example, when you get a long id parameter on a click on a list item, that is the _ID value.