How to Persist Information in an Android Device
Information can be anything. It can be device related information, app related information, sensor reports and in fact anything. It is important definitely to think of How to persist information in an android device, which is considered quite vulnerable to online threats. Viruses have now started hitting your phones as well and if your data is lost due to some ransom ware or your bank account is hacked then you will have to blame yourself first. However, you need not worry at all. The Android framework offers several strategies for persistence. Some of strategies are as below:
- Shared preferences
- Local files
- Sqlite Database
- ORM
You can save the basic data on your Android phone as key value pair. You can share the arbitrary files to external or internal device storage using the local files. You can ensure persistence of data in the tables through the application specific database. You can also describe and persistence of model objects using the high value query update syntax.
There is typical use case with each storage options. The shared preference is used for app preferences, keys and session preferences. The local files are being used for the blob data and also the data file caches. Disk image is a perfect example of such data file caches. The SQLite is being used for complex local data manipulation for the rare speed. The ORM is used to store the simple relational data locally to reduce the SQL Boilerplate. You should note that a typical app make use of all these storage options in various manners.
Let’s discuss the Object relation mapping to persist information in an Android device. Instead of retrieving the SQLite database directly we can make use of the higher level wrappers for managing the SQLite persistence. One can find many popular ORMs for Android and some of them are as below:
- DBFlow
- ActiveAndroid
- SugarORM
- JDXA etc.
As an example DBFlow can easily query the database and return the result as a list for use. Similarly, you can use other ORMs. Make use of all these if you want to find the answer of How to persist information in an android device.
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