Design and Implementation of an Unified Cursor Considering Synchronization on the Android Mobile Platform

Android platform provides a content provider and a cursor mechanism to access the internal SQLite engine. Content providers not only store and retrieve data but also make it accessible to applications. Applications can only share data through content provider, since there's no common storage area that Android packages can access. Cursor is an interface that provides random read-write access to the result set returned by a database query. However, this cursor possesses two major limitations. First, a cursor does not support a join clause among cursors, since the cursor can only access a single table in the content provider. Second, the cursor is not capable of creating user-customized field in the predefined content providers. In this paper, we propose the unified cursor architecture that merges several cursors into a single virtual cursor. Cursor translation look-aside buffer (TLB), column windowing mechanism and virtual data management are the three major techniques we have adopted to implement our structure. And we also propose a delayed synchronization method between an application and a proposed unified cursor. An application can create a user-customized field and sort multiple tables using a unified cursor on Android platform.

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