Android ContentProvider Uri Matching

Question

I am trying to create a content provider where the key contains forward slash "/". I searched about it for quite a while but there is no place/example illustrating it.

content://com.lily.provider/items/*

General example, which I understand: content://com.lily.provider/items/ab

What I want to do: my key is a string with "/"
content://com.lily.provider/items/a/b where a/b is the item id, which is in the same position as ab.

My question:

1. will content://com.lily.provider/items/a/b be matched to content://com.lily.provider/items/* ? why is that?
2. are there any work-around I could use to solve the problem

Answer 1

Will content://com.lily.provider/items/a/b be matched to content://com.lily.provider/items/* ? why is that?

Yes, it will match. The asterisk * means "match any characters, including slashes".

Are there any work-around I could use to solve the problem

If you want to match known prefixes, then you can just add more entries to your URI matcher (in this order):

• content://com.lily.provider/items/a/*
• content://com.lily.provider/items/b/*
• content://com.lily.provider/items/*

If you insist on having slashes in the data, then you should URI-encode slashes that aren't being used as path separators to %2f.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what the problem is. The "/items/a/b" URI will match your original pattern as desired, and then you can parse the path component of the URI as you wish.