The Android SQLite API
There are a number of different ways in which the Android API makes it fairly easy for us to use our app's database. The first class we need to get familiar with is SQLiteOpenHelper.
SQLiteOpenHelper and SQLiteDatabase
The SQLiteDatabase class is the class that represents the actual database. The SQLiteOpenHelper class, however, is where most of the action takes place. This class will enable us to get access to a database and initialize an instance of
SQLiteDatabase.
In addition, the SQLiteOpenHelper class, which we will extend in our forthcoming mini app, has two methods to override. First, it has an onCreate method, which is called the first time a database is used, and therefore it makes sense that we place our SQL in this method to create our table structure.
The other method we must override is onUpgrade, which, as you can probably guess, is called when we upgrade our database (ALTER its structure). Exactly how this works is best explained with a practical...
