Android SQLite database requires special table

I’m working on an Android application recently. During the development, our new app inherited a legacy SQLite database that created by a WinCE application.

Android announce that it supports the SQLite database, so we don’t worry about that too much. But when we try to open the legacy database with SQLiteDatabase.openDatabase, it throws exception on our face!

After debugging, we found to open SQLite database with SQLiteDatabase class requires the database to have a special table called android_metadata, which contains the locale information. And SQLiteDatabase yields exception when the table cannot be found.

The table will be created automatically when SQLiteDatabase creates the database, but if the app need to open the database not created by android, some patch is needed.

Here is the script to patch the database:

Patch Database

CREATE TABLE android_metadata (locale TEXT);
INSERT INTO android_metadata VALUES('en-US');