How to Read MMS Data in Android?

Question

I want to read MMS data I have seen the part table in the mmssms.db where the mms entries are stored; I am using a cursor and I want to know the appropriate URI; I am using "content://mms-sms/conversations" and the Column names of "Address"(Sent to), "Text" or "Subject" and "Data" column name of image.

I have seen the schema of mmssms.db and Their Column of part Table.

Answer 1

It's kind of difficult to find documentation about this, so I will collect here all information I have found. If you are in a rush or just don't like to read, jump to the How to get data from a SMS section.

content://mms-sms/conversations

This is the URI of the Mms and SMS provider... which allows us to query the MMS and SMS databases at the same time, and mix them in a single thread (which are called conversations).

Why is the URI important? Well, that's the standard way of getting MMS and SMS messages; for instance, when you receive a SMS and click on the notification bar, it will send a broadcast intent like this: content://mms-sms/conversations/XXX, where XXX is the id of the conversation.

Get a list of all conversations

The only thing you have to do is to query the content://mms-sms/conversations Uri:

ContentResolver contentResolver = getContentResolver();
final String[] projection = new String[]{"*"};
Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://mms-sms/conversations/");
Cursor query = contentResolver.query(uri, projection, null, null, null);

Note: usually, when you call query and want to return all columns you can pass null as the projection parameter. However, you cannot do that with this provider, so that's why I'm using *.

Now you can loop through the Cursor as usual. These are the more important columns you would want to use:

• _id is the ID of the message. Captain obvious to the rescue? Not really. This ID can be used to retrieve detailed information using either content://sms or content://mms.
• date no explanation needed.
• thread_id is the ID of the conversation
• body The content of the last SMS on this conversation. If it's an MMS, even if it has a text part, this will be null.

Note: if you query content://mms-sms/conversations it will return a list of different conversations whose _id is the last SMS or MMS in each conversation. If you query content://mms-sms/conversations/xxx it will return each SMS and/or MMS on the conversation whose ID is xxx.

How to differentiate between SMS and MMS

Usually, you will want to know which type of message you are handling. Documentation says:

A virtual column, MmsSms.TYPE_DISCRIMINATOR_COLUMN, may be requested in the projection for a query. Its value is either "mms" or "sms", depending on whether the message represented by the row is an MMS message or an SMS message, respectively.

I think it's referring to this variable... however I have not been able to make it work. If you have please tell me how or edit this post.

So far this is what I have done and it seems to work but there must be better ways:

ContentResolver contentResolver = getContentResolver();
final String[] projection = new String[]{"_id", "ct_t"};
Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://mms-sms/conversations/");
Cursor query = contentResolver.query(uri, projection, null, null, null);
if (query.moveToFirst()) {
    do {
        String string = query.getString(query.getColumnIndex("ct_t"));
        if ("application/vnd.wap.multipart.related".equals(string)) {
            // it's MMS
        } else {
            // it's SMS
        }
    } while (query.moveToNext());
}

How to get data from a SMS

So you have the ID of the SMS, then the only thing you have to do is:

String selection = "_id = "+id;
Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://sms");
Cursor cursor = contentResolver.query(uri, null, selection, null, null);
String phone = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("address"));
int type = cursor.getInt(cursor.getColumnIndex("type"));// 2 = sent, etc.
String date = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("date"));
String body = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("body"));

How to get data from a MMS data?

MMSs are a little bit different. They can be built with different parts (text, audio, images, etc.); so here will see how to retrieve each kind of data separately.

So let's guess we have the MMS id in the mmsId variable. We can get detailed information about this MMS by using the content://mms/ provider:

Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://mms/");
String selection = "_id = " + mmsId;
Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(uri, null, selection, null, null);

However, the only interesting column is read which is 1 if the message has already been read.

How to get text content from MMS

Here we have to use content://mms/part... for instance:

String selectionPart = "mid=" + mmsId;
Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://mms/part");
Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(uri, null,
    selectionPart, null, null);
if (cursor.moveToFirst()) {
    do {
        String partId = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("_id"));
        String type = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("ct"));
        if ("text/plain".equals(type)) {
            String data = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("_data"));
            String body;
            if (data != null) {
                // implementation of this method below
                body = getMmsText(partId);
            } else {
                body = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex("text"));
            }
        }
    } while (cursor.moveToNext());
}

It could contain different parts of text... but usually it'd be only one. So if you want to remove the loop it will work most of the times. This is how the getMmsText method looks like:

private String getMmsText(String id) {
    Uri partURI = Uri.parse("content://mms/part/" + id);
    InputStream is = null;
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    try {
        is = getContentResolver().openInputStream(partURI);
        if (is != null) {
            InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8");
            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(isr);
            String temp = reader.readLine();
            while (temp != null) {
                sb.append(temp);
                temp = reader.readLine();
            }
        }
    } catch (IOException e) {}
    finally {
        if (is != null) {
            try {
                is.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {}
        }
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

How to get image from MMS

It's the same than getting the text part... the only difference is that you will be looking for a different mime-type:

String selectionPart = "mid=" + mmsId;
Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://mms/part");
Cursor cPart = getContentResolver().query(uri, null,
    selectionPart, null, null);
if (cPart.moveToFirst()) {
    do {
        String partId = cPart.getString(cPart.getColumnIndex("_id"));
        String type = cPart.getString(cPart.getColumnIndex("ct"));
        if ("image/jpeg".equals(type) || "image/bmp".equals(type) ||
                "image/gif".equals(type) || "image/jpg".equals(type) ||
                "image/png".equals(type)) {
            Bitmap bitmap = getMmsImage(partId);
        }
    } while (cPart.moveToNext());
}

This is how the getMmsImage method looks like:

private Bitmap getMmsImage(String _id) {
    Uri partURI = Uri.parse("content://mms/part/" + _id);
    InputStream is = null;
    Bitmap bitmap = null;
    try {
        is = getContentResolver().openInputStream(partURI);
        bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);
    } catch (IOException e) {}
    finally {
        if (is != null) {
            try {
                is.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {}
        }
    }
    return bitmap;
}

How to get the sender address

You will need to use the content://mms/xxx/addr provider, where xxx is the id of the MMS:

private String getAddressNumber(int id) {
    String selectionAdd = new String("msg_id=" + id);
    String uriStr = MessageFormat.format("content://mms/{0}/addr", id);
    Uri uriAddress = Uri.parse(uriStr);
    Cursor cAdd = getContentResolver().query(uriAddress, null,
        selectionAdd, null, null);
    String name = null;
    if (cAdd.moveToFirst()) {
        do {
            String number = cAdd.getString(cAdd.getColumnIndex("address"));
            if (number != null) {
                try {
                    Long.parseLong(number.replace("-", ""));
                    name = number;
                } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
                    if (name == null) {
                        name = number;
                    }
                }
            }
        } while (cAdd.moveToNext());
    }
    if (cAdd != null) {
        cAdd.close();
    }
    return name;
}

Final thoughts

• Can't understand why Google, with those thousands of millions of dollars, don't pay a student or someone else to document this API. You have to check the source code to know how it works and, which is worse, they don't make public those constants used in the columns of the database, so we have to write them manually.
• For other kind of data inside an MMS you can apply the same idea learned above... it's just a matter of knowing the mime-type.