Android Arch's Room - Relation

Hi friends! It has been a long time since my last post. I’ve been really tired for the past 6 months. Let’s get to the point then.

On the previous post, we already discussed the basic Room from AAC (Android Architecture Component). In this post, we’re gonna explore the how to create a relationship between tables

Goal

So in the previous post, we have a User table with a schema like this:

We want to create a relationship so we need another table. Let’s make Car table

The relation will be one-to-many where one user can own many cars.

Our goals are:

1. We can get all the user for certain car name
2. We can query all the users with all their cars.

Relation

Implementing relationship in Room is very easy, you just have to define the relationship in your @Entity. In our case, we have to define that owner in Car table is an FK to userId in the User table.

@Entity(
        tableName = "car",
        foreignKeys = [ForeignKey(
                entity = User::class,
                parentColumns = ["userId"],
                childColumns = ["owner"]
        )]
)
data class Car(
        @PrimaryKey(autoGenerate = true)
        val carId: Int? = null,
        val name: String,
        val owner: Int
)

Here you can see, we define our relationship in between Car and User in Car @Entity. Let me make a brief explanation:

1. The entity is a target class, in this case, is our User class.
2. The parentColumns is our target column, it has to be a primary key. In our case, userId column in User.
3. The childColumns is our foreign key defined where this rule is written. In our case, owner column in Car.

OK, done. Let’s create some query!

First Goal

Our first goal is that we can have all the user that owns certain Car. For this, we can simply create a query in our DAO.

    @Query("SELECT u.* FROM user u JOIN car c WHERE c.name = :name")
    fun getUsersWithCar(name: String): List<User>

UserDao.kt

Hooray! We already create our first join query in Room.

Second Goal

Our second goal is that we can query all the users with all their cars. We want to make the data representation for this query to be separated. So we create our UserWithCars class that has a content:

data class UserWitCars(
        @Embedded var user: User? = null,
        @Relation(parentColumn = "userId", entityColumn = "owner") var cars: List<Car>? = null
)

Simple right? Here we define our relationship for cars list.

1. parentColumn is our target key in @Embedded entity
2. entityColumn is our FK in defined list entity

Then we just create or simple query in UserDao

@Query("SELECT * FROM user")
fun getUserWithCars(): List<UserWitCars>

Done! We just querying all our users will all their cars!

You can find the source of this example on my Github

For the next article, we’re gonna discuss about creating a transaction in Room. It will be a quick one though.

That’s all for now, see you guys later. Cao 👋