I have an Android application using parse as a backend. One of my tables in my parse database contains groups of users, one row in this table contains 6 columns of users to form one group.
I would like to return each row where the current user is contained in one of the columns.
My question is what is the most optimum way of achieving this?As it stands I can think of two ways:1. query each row in the groups table and loop through each cloumn looking for the current users username.
2. if possible - use a parse query that says if currenUser equals member 1 or member 2 or member 3 or member 4 or member 5 or member 6. But I don't know if this is possible
Any pointers or help would be appreciated?
For your ParseQuery<ParseObject> query object a whereEqualTo method is available query.whereEqualTo(key, value); try using your column name in place or key and your desired value in in place of value.
Using this you will only get the rows which contains your desired values. It just works as the where clause in SQL qyery. so you will not need to iterate over all the DB entries.
In my Android app, I need to temporarily store some data in a form of table such as follows:
id | column 1 | column 2 | ... | column n
The data are downloaded from a server whenever users press a button. However, the data table doesn't have a fix number of column (as well as row) every time user downloads it from the server. For example, the server may send data with 3 columns the first time. Then it might send data with 5 columns the second time, etc...
Given this scenario, I think the database is probably the right data structure to use. My plan is to create a database, then add and delete tables as necessary. So I have been reading various tutorials on Android database (one example is this one http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/119293/Using-SQLite-Database-with-Android#). It seems to me I cannot create new table with variable number of columns using the sqlite database. Is this correct? In the onCreate(SQLiteDatabase db) method, the "create table" command must be specified with known number of columns and their data types. I could provide several "create table" commands, each with different number of columns but that seems like very crude. Is there a way to create database tables with variable number of columns on the fly?
Another alternative probably using several hash tables, each storing one column of the data table. I'm seriously considering this approach if the database approach is not possible. Any better suggestion is welcomed.
There is no such thing as a variable number of columns in an SQLite data base. Also, adding and deleting tables dynamically seems like a horrible hack.
It sounds like you want to store an array of values associated with an id. I suggest you think in terms of rows, not columns. Use a table structure like (id, index, value); each array of values returned by the server results in as many rows as necessary to store the values.
what i am trying to use is that i want to select cities from my LocationByCity table in sqlite database each time As user inters search word in a search box,
for example if user enters F i want all the CityNames Starting From F ,so how can i do that?
Thanx in advance.
I'd have to check up, but I believe you want to use the LIKE keyword.
Syntax somthing along the lines of:
Select Fieldname From Tablename where fieldname LIKE ('%$myvar%');
where the % signs are wildcard characters.
Not sure if sqlite has fulltext indexing so you should be aware that can get very slow depending on how many rows you have in the table.
The Android app that I am currently working on dynamically adds columns to an SQLite database. The problem I have is that I cannot figure out a way to remove these columns from the database.
If I add column A, B, C, D, and E to the database, is it possible to later remove column C?
I have done a lot of looking around and the closest thing I could find was a solution that requires building a backup table and moving all the columns (except the one to be deleted) into that backup table.
I can't figure out how I would do this, though. I add all the columns dynamically so their names are not defined as variables in my Java code. There doesn't seem to be a way to retrieve a column name by using Android's SQLiteDatabase.
SQLite has limited ALTER TABLE support that you can use to add a column to the end of a table or to change the name of a table.
If you want to make more complex changes in the structure of a table, you will have to recreate the table. You can save existing data to a temporary table, drop the old table, create the new table, then copy the data back in from the temporary table.
For example, suppose you have a table named "t1" with columns names "a", "b", and "c" and that you want to delete column "c" from this table. The following steps illustrate how this could be done:
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t1_backup(a,b);
INSERT INTO t1_backup SELECT a,b FROM t1;
DROP TABLE t1;
CREATE TABLE t1(a,b);
INSERT INTO t1 SELECT a,b FROM t1_backup;
DROP TABLE t1_backup;
COMMIT;
SQLite doesn't support a way to drop a column in its SQL syntax, so its unlikely to show up in a wrapper API. SQLite doesn't often support all features that traditional databases support.
The solutions you've identified make sense and are ways to do it. Ugly, but valid ways to do it.
You can also 'deprecate' the columns and not use them by convention in newer versions of your app. That way older versions of your app that depend on column C won't break.
Oh... just noticed this comment:
The app is (basically) an attendance tracking spreadsheet. You can add
a new "event" and then indicate the people that attended or didn't.
The columns are the "events".
Based on that comment you should just create another table for your events and link to it from your other table(s). You should never have to add columns to support new domain objects like that. Each logical domain object should be represented by its own table. E.g. user, location, event...
Was writing this initially. Will keep it if you're interested:
Instead of dynamically adding and removing columns you should consider using an EAV data model for that part of your database that needs to be dynamic.
EAV data models store values as name/value pairs and the db structure never needs to change.
Based on your comment below about adding a column for each event, I'd strongly suggest creating a second table in which each row will represent an event, and then tracking attendance by storing the user row id and the id of the event row in the attendance table. Continually piling columns onto the attendance table is a definite anti-pattern.
With regards to how to find out about the table schema, you can query the sqlite_master table as described in this other SO question - Is there an SQLite equivalent to MySQL's DESCRIBE [table]?
As per SQLite FAQ, there is only limited support to the ALTER TABLE SQL command. So, the only way you can do is that ou can save existing data to a temporary table, drop the old table, create the new table, then copy the data back in from the temporary table.
Also you can get the column name from the database using a query. Any query say "SELECT * FROM " gives you a cursor object. You can use the method
String getColumnName(int columnIndex);
or
String[] getColumnNames();
to retrieve the names of the columns.
In my application ,am work with a large database.Nearly 75000 records present in a table(totally 6 tables are there).i want to get a data from three different table at a time.i completed that.but the search process was slow.how can i optimise the searching process?
You might want to consider using the full-text search engine and issuing SELECT...MATCH queries instead. Note that you need to enable the FTS engine (it's disabled by default) and create virtual tables instead of regular tables. You can read more about it here.
Without being able to see the table structure (or query) the first thing I'd suggest is adding some indexes to the tables.
Lets say you have a few tables like:
Author
id
last_name
first_name
Subject
id
name
Book
id
title
author_id
subject_id
and you're wanting to get all the information about each of the books that an author with last_name="Smith" and first_name="John" wrote. Your query might look something like this:
SELECT * FROM Book b
LEFT JOIN Subject s
ON s.id=b.subject_id
LEFT JOIN Author a
ON a.id=b.author_id
WHERE a.last_name='Smith'
AND a.first_name='John';
There you'd want the last_name column in the Author table to have an index (and maybe first_name too).