How to determine where a contact was added?

Question

I have been struggling with an approach to this problem for some time now. There is no Intent action fired off when a contact is added (as far as I know). What are my options to solve this issue?

Here are some ideas I have been playing with:

1. Firstly I kept a record of user locations with timestamps and periodically scan the Contacts DB and add new entries to my own DB with a timestamp. I could then compare these and try to find a decent match. I do not like this approach as it is very error prone.
2. Recently I've been looking at a ContentObserver for the Contacts DB, but I am not sure how to set this up so that it will constantly be observing, and not just when my app is in focus. Perhaps in a service? The documentation isn't clear to me about the life-cycle of a content observer, i.e does it die after the service/activity that registered it dies?

So really what I want is a seamless way to record where and when a user adds a contact when my app is installed on the device. It is not enough that the app should be in focus/running.

Answer 1

The second idea of yours is the correct one. The observer needs to be in a service as you had rightly guessed. Register the observer in the onCreate(). You will use contentProvider in the onChange of the contentObserver. You will need to maintain time when you last read the database using shared preferences. Note the changes of entries after the time stored in shared preferences. Now update the time of shared preferences to current time. Also unregister the content observer in onDestroy().