Question

I’m using cursors to retrieve data from a database. I know how to retrieve entire columns to use on listviews and such, but I’m struggling to find a way to retrieve a single value.

Let’s say I have a table with two columns (“_id” and “Name”) and I have ten records (rows) in that table. How would I get, for example, the Name in the third row? Considering I defined a cursor that reads that table:

public Cursor getMyNameInfo() {

    SQLiteDatabase db = getReadableDatabase();
    SQLiteQueryBuilder qb = new SQLiteQueryBuilder();


    String sqlTables = "MyNames";
    qb.setTables(sqlTables);
    Cursor c = qb.query(db, null, null, null,
            null, null, null);  

    c.moveToFirst();
    return c;
    }

Answer 1

Instead of c.moveToFirst() use c.moveToPosition(2) (Cursor indexes are zero-based hence ‘2’ is the third record).

Remember to check that the Cursor has valid data first though.

EDIT:

Once you’ve moved the cursor to the 3rd record as I explain above, use the following to just get the value of the “Name” column.

String theName = c.getString(getColumnIndex("Name"));