Question

I’m trying to understand why they would start the cursor before the first position in a row and why it would end after the last position. Is there an inherit advantage to doing it this way?

For example:

public abstract int getPosition () 

Since: API Level 1
Returns the current position of the cursor in the row set. The value is zero-based. When the row set is first returned the cursor will be at position -1, which is before the first row. After the last row is returned another call to
next()
will leave the cursor past the last entry, at a position of
count().

returns
the current cursor position.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Because a Cursor isn’t guaranteed to be populated with rows. If you got a Cursor back from a database with 0 rows, the initial position being at 0 doesn’t make sense since there isn’t a row at position 0.