The native SQLite APIs for Android have a glitch: inserting a completely empty ContentValues doesn’t work. The reason is that SQLite requires at least one column to be specified on an insert.
To get around that, the native SQLiteDatabase insert helper has an odd extra argument, nullColumnHack. The idea is that this should be the name of a nullable column in the table into which you’re doing the insert. So, if you want to insert a completely empty ContentValues, you also supply a column name in nullColumnHack. It then behaves as if you’d explicitly set the value of the column named in nullColumnHack to null, in the ContentValues, thereby meeting SQLite’s requirement that you name at least one column.
(So, why not just do that? Never mind.)
The problem I’m trying to address here is that the Positronic Net generic ContentRepository framework doesn’t allow callers to supply this odd extra argument on an insert, and there’s no obvious place to put it. Right now, we just supply a null as the value of nullColumnHack — which is always fine, so long as the argument ContentValues isn’t empty. But what if it is?
Fortunately, to work, it just has to be the name of some nullable column in the relevant table — meaning that the same value will work for any insert into a given table. Which means that if the caller can’t supply it at the point of the insert (because the API has no place for it), it could be supplied at database creation:
object TodoDb extends Database(
filename = "todos.sqlite3",
nullColumnHack = Map( "todo_items" -> "sign_off_date", ...)
)
{
def schemaUpdates = ...
}
and we could rig insert on a DB-backed ContentQuery to look up the proper value for its table in the map. As a fringe benefit, this lets the programmer write the set of names down just once, as opposed to once per insert.
(If the overhead for one lookup in a tiny hash per insert got to be significant, the implementation support for this could be bundled into a subclass of Database.)
As another fringe benefit, writing this down is a quick way to check the formatting of design notes.
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