How do I get a Uri to an image in my Assets that will work for the SearchManager.SUGGEST_COLUMN_ICON_1 column?

Question

I have successfully integrated my app\'s country search into the global search facility and now I am trying to display each country\'s flag next to the search suggestions.

Answer 1

Sadly after much searching around I have reached the conclusion that you cannot return a uri to an image asset to the search facility. What I did instead was move my flag images to the resources (so they do not clutter up my app's resources I created a library for the flag images) and use resource uri's. So, in my provider I have code that looks like this in the loop that maps database results to search results:

            if (requestedColumns[index].compareTo (SearchManager.SUGGEST_COLUMN_ICON_1) == 0)  {
                //  Translate the country code into a flag icon uri
                String countryCode = dbResults.getString (
                        dbResults.getColumnIndexOrThrow (queryMappedColumns[index]));

                int flagImageID = FlagLookup.smallFlagResourceID (countryCode);
                String flagUriStr = "android.resource://com.lesliesoftware.worldinfo/" + flagImageID;
                columnValues.add (flagUriStr);
            }  

and look up code that looks like this:

static public int smallFlagResourceID (String countryCode)  {
    if (countryCode == null || countryCode.length () == 0)
        return R.drawable.flag_small_none;

    if (countryCode.equalsIgnoreCase ("aa"))
        return R.drawable.flag_small_aa;
    else if (countryCode.equalsIgnoreCase ("ac"))
        return R.drawable.flag_small_ac;
    else if (countryCode.equalsIgnoreCase ("ae"))
        return R.drawable.flag_small_ae;
    ...

I will just have to make sure I create a test that verifies that all countries that have flags returns the expected results.