Question

Well, I’ve been looking around and can’t find a specific way to actually DISPLAY the contacts list. I’ve found tutorials such as higher pass’s but it never actually discusses how to display them, just how to get them. I simply want to display the contacts list in a listView or something similar. I know it has to be a lot more simple than I’m making it out to be, because it seems to be a common thing. Specifically, all I want is the contact’s name and phone numbers. I have my query set up, which I got the above mentioned tutorial, and I think it’s right:

        ContentResolver cr = getContentResolver();
    Cursor cur = cr.query(ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI,
            null, null, null, null);
    if (cur.getCount() > 0) {
    while (cur.moveToNext()) {
        String id = cur.getString(
                    cur.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts._ID));
    String name = cur.getString(
                    cur.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME));

    if (Integer.parseInt(cur.getString(cur.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts.HAS_PHONE_NUMBER))) > 0) {
        Cursor pCur = cr.query(
                ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI, 
                null, 
                ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTACT_ID +" = ?", 
                new String[]{id}, null);
                while (pCur.moveToNext()) {
                } 
                pCur.close();
        }
        }
}

Answer 1

There is a built-in activity for this:

startActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI));

If you use startActivityForResult(), you can even get the user’s chosen contact back.

If that’s not what you’re looking for, you want to cut back to a single query if possible, then create an Adapter for your ListView. Here is a sample project that shows querying the contacts to populate a ListView, showing either the contact’s name, name and phone number, or name and email address. This gets a bit more complicated because the sample shows both the Android 1.6-and-lower and Android 2.0-and-higher contacts APIs.