Dealing with (cross-process) exceptions in Android custom content provider

Question

I have a custom content provider in my Android app that works reasonably well. I expect other apps to also access my content provider. I would like some clean way to communica

Answer 1

There is a short list of RuntimeException subclasses which, if thrown in the provider, will be re-thrown in a client app. These include:

• IllegalStateException
• IllegalArgumentException
• NullPointerException
• SecurityException
• BadParcelableException

A more recent update to the Parcel.writeException documentation added

• UnsupportedOperationException
• NetworkOnMainThreadException

Source: Creating Content Providers mentions IAE and NPE; I guessed that the others would work based on the Javadoc for Parcel.writeException.

The client app will only get the detail message, not a stack trace or the cause stack. For exceptional state which can be encoded into a String (the detail message), this is a reasonable choice.

I'm still interested in other solutions, too.