Android - Show list of contacts with same phone number

Question

I have a widget that will open the contacts list by a phone number. I am using *Contacts.Intents.SHOW_OR_CREATE_CONTACT* I know it's deprecated but I want this to work on android 1.6. I have a phone number to use on the lookup intent. here is the code

Intent contViewIntent = new Intent(Contacts.Intents.SHOW_OR_CREATE_CONTACT);
contViewIntent.setData(Uri.fromParts("tel", number, null));

PendingIntent contPendIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, contViewIntent, 0);
views.setOnClickPendingIntent(viewID, contPendIntent);

When the Contact list has 2 or more contacts with the same number then this will open the list of contacts and has the user select one. This works fine on 1.6, but on 2.0 and above it shows a list of contacts with just the number 1 or number 2 in the names and when you select one of those from the list to view you get an error.

04-09 19:12:47.891: ERROR/CursorWindow(105): Bad request for field slot 0,6. numRows = 2, numColumns = 6

04-09 19:12:47.992: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(105): java.lang.IllegalStateException: get field slot from row 0 col 6 failed

how do I get this to work on 1.6 and 2.0 above?

Answer 1

I think you may be better using the Android content provider api in combination with a SQL query (find row or rows with telephone number match):

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-providers.html

Then you can show a option screen asking user to select which contact is appropriate if the query returns two contacts.

Then you can pass the _id field (which is unique) to the contacts app to open the selected contact (avoiding the error you see).

Answer 2

Android 2.0 has a completely new API for managing contacts (look up ContactsContract). In my app, I ended up writing the low-level contact management twice - once for 2.0, once for 1.6 and under (I check via reflection to see if the ContactsContract class exists and switch to the 2.0+ code in that case).