How do I catch content provider initialize?

Question

As we know content provider loads on application run. But I want to make some operations before content provider will launch. How do I catch this operation? Before content provider's onCreate method would be called

Warrington

Answer 1

I think Ive found solution. Ive created my custom application class and overridden attachBaseContext method

<application android:name=".ApplicationController" ...>

---

public class ApplicationController extends Application {
    @Override
    protected void attachBaseContext(Context base) {
        super.attachBaseContext(base);

        // some of your own operations before content provider will launch
    }
}

Warrington

That may work at the moment, but I do not know if it will be reliable across versions. – Haulm

Its survived across 17 apis )) Maybe in the feature google will provide us any apis for this operation, but for now it works. Thank you for reply! – Warrington

This solution works, however it's not fully functional. For instance, the Context.getMainLooper() method returns null when called before Application.onCreate(). – Riparian

Be carefully: in this method getApplicationContext() will also return null, because the Application.onCreate() is not called yet. – Zoi

Answer 2

My solution requires use of the call(Uri, String, String, Bundle) API (so, it's not fully backward-compatible). But I have the stuff that I want the ContentProvider to prepare before it is used in my override of that call method. Then I do getContentResolver().call(BASE_URI, METHOD, null, Bundle.EMPTY) in my Application.onCreate(). Essentially, it defers that stuff until after my Application is being created, which is what we expected the ContentProvider's onCreate to be doing naturally.

Tetter