Getting a phone number using ContactsContract in Android - doesn't work

Question

I wrote the following function to get one phone number that belongs to a contact with the identifier "contactID".

Function that is designed to retrieve a phone number:

private String getContactPhone(String contactID) { Uri uri = ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI; String[] projection = null; String where = ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTACT_ID +" = ?"; String[] selectionArgs = new String[] { contactID }; String sortOrder = null; Cursor result = managedQuery(uri, projection, where, selectionArgs, sortOrder); if (result.moveToFirst()) { String phone = result.getString(result.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER)); if (phone == null) { result.close(); return null; } result.close(); return phone; } result.close(); return null; } 

How this function is called:

 ArrayList<Contact> resultContacts = new ArrayList<Contact>(); Cursor result = null; Uri uri = ContactsContract.Data.CONTENT_URI; String[] projection = new String[] { ContactsContract.Contacts._ID, ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.CONTACT_ID, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.START_DATE, }; String where = ContactsContract.Data.MIMETYPE+" = ? AND "+ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.TYPE+" = "+ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.TYPE_BIRTHDAY; String[] selectionArgs = new String[] {ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE}; String sortOrder = null; result = managedQuery(uri, projection, where, selectionArgs, sortOrder); while (result.moveToNext()) { Long id = result.getLong(result.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts._ID)); String phone = getContactPhone(String.valueOf(id)); ... } ... 

Unfortunately, it does not work. I get null if I call this function with a value that I got from "ContactsContract.Contacts._ID". Why is this so? What's wrong?

Edit: I used the Contacts._ID card for CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTACT_ID - this did not work. But now I map Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME to CommonDataKinds.Phone.DISPLAY_NAME, and it works all of a sudden - it's strange, isn't it? But I would prefer matching identifiers instead of display names. Therefore, the issue remains relevant. Could this be due to different identifiers in these tables? Doesn't that mean there are search identifiers?

Answer 1

To get the contact id in the first part, you should use:

 ContactsContract.Data.CONTACT_ID 

instead:

 ContactsContract.Contacts._ID 

Thus, the projection should be:

 String[] projection = new String[] { ContactsContract.Data.CONTACT_ID, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.CONTACT_ID, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.START_DATE, }; 

And then, of course, get the correct line:

 Long id = result.getLong(result.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Data.CONTACT_ID)); 

Answer 2

You get a null value because you specified a null projection. A projection is basically a list of columns that you want to return, for example.

 String[] projection = {ContactsContract.Contacts._ID, ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME, ContactsContract.Contacts.HAS_PHONE_NUMBER}; 

Usually, when you find a contact, they may have a list of phone numbers, so you need to use a different cursor to iterate over the phone numbers, for example.

 Cursor phones = mContext.getContentResolver().query(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_URI, null, ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTACT_ID +" = "+ contactId, null, null); while (phones.moveToNext()) { phoneNumber = phones.getString(phones.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.DATA)); } 

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Your code for getContactPhone () works fine on my part. I tested by opening a contact group, selecting a contact, then using the identifier that was returned and passed to your method.

Therefore, I suspect that you are really passing an invalid identifier. Can you post a full stack trace to exclude a null pointer?

Yes, search keys are available because _ID is not guaranteed to do the same, since synchronization and aggregation of contacts change them.