AlienDroid - ActiveRecord

Install

IMPORTANT: Sorry, we don't have a final version yet. Maybe with your help, we can do that soon. :) Just help us with tests, suggestions, comments and so on. We publish our artifacts at Sonatype Nexus.

If you use Maven, just add these dependency:

<dependency>
	<groupId>com.alienlabz</groupId>
	<artifactId>aliendroid-activerecord</artifactId>
	<version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

If you don't use Maven, just go to our Download section and get aliendroid-core.jar and aliendroid-activerecord.jar. Add those jars to your dependencies in your Android project. You will need RoboGuice and his specifics dependencies too:

1. RoboGuice 2 Download
2. Guice 3 No AOP
3. JSR 305
4. javax.inject

Using

You need initialize our engine. To do that, create one class that inherits from android.app.Application and execute AlienDroid.init(this) method:

public class MyApplication extends android.app.Application {

	@Override
	public void onCreate() {
		super.onCreate();
		AlienDroid.init(this);
	}

}

Remember to inform this class in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<application
    android:name=".MyApplication"
    android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher"
    android:label="@string/app_name" >
...

Using AlienDroid!

Now, suppose that your project has only one class that you want to map to a table. Let's call this class "Contact":

public class Contact extends Model {
	public String name;
	public Date birth;
	public Integer age;
}

That's all you need. No annotations are required. Not even configurations. Now, you can simply do:

public MyActivity extends RoboActivity {

	@Override
	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
		setContentView(R.layout.main);
		
		Contact contact = new Contact();
		contact.name = "My Name";
		contact.birth = new Date();
		contact.age = 21;
		contact.save();
	}
}

So, do you want to know what AlienDroid is doing behind the scenes?

1. Creating a database named "database.sqlite".
2. Creating one table per Model subclass.
3. Creating table columns based on your model attributes.

Queries

To load data from database, just do:

public MyActivity extends RoboActivity {

	@Override
	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
		setContentView(R.layout.main);
		
		Contact contact = Model.load(Contact.class, 1);
		contact.name = "Changed Name";
		contact.save();
		
		List<Contact> contacts = Model.findAll(Contact.class);
		List<Contact> contacts = Model.where(Contact.class, "name like '?'", new String[] {"name"});
		
		contact.delete();
	}
}

Changing Database Name

If you don't like how we named your database file (database.sqlite), you can change it. Just add those lines to your AndroidManifest file (remember to put it inside tag).

    <meta-data android:name="DATABASE_NAME" android:value="mydatabase.sqlite"/>
    <meta-data android:name="DATABASE_VERSION" android:value="1"/>

Events

You can observes database events too. Suppose you want to apply some changes to your tables when database's version is changed.

public MyActivity extends RoboActivity {

	@Override
	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
		setContentView(R.layout.main);
	}
	
	public void databaseUpgrade(@Observes DatabaseUpgrade event) {
		event.getDatabase();
	}
	
	public void databaseCreated(@Observes DatabaseCreated event) {
		event.getDatabase();
	}
}

Relationships

AlienDroid ActiveRecord doesn't implement relationships.