Store additional data in Android Account Manager

android accountmanager
Jon Wells picture Jon Wells · Aug 15, 2011 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

I'd like to use the android AccountManager to sync my webservice and application (standard sync of contacts and calander) however, AccountManager only appears to store a username and password. My web service takes three credentials: a username, a password and an account. What is the best practice for storing the third piece of information?

Answer

Carlos N picture Carlos N · Dec 16, 2011

As pablisco explained, you can use AccountManager's ability to store arbitrary user data through addAccountExplicitly()'s userData Bundle parameter: 

    final Bundle extraData = new Bundle();
    extraData.putString("someKey", "stringData");
    boolean accountCreated = am.addAccountExplicitly(account, password, extraData);

Later on, for example in your Authenticator's getAuthToken() method, you can retrieve the data related to the account you are working with:

    String myData = am.getUserData(account, "someKey");

Unfortunately as of this writing you can only retrieve Strings, so your data should be stored as a String when you first build the Bundle. Hope this helps someone.

Related questions

What should I use Android AccountManager for?

I've seen AccountManager in the Android SDK and that it is used for storing account information. Thus, I cannot find any general discussion of what it is intended for. Does anyone know of any helpful discussions of what the intention …

Read More
How to call parent activity function from ASyncTask?

setAccountAuthenticatorResult can be called from the Activity, which extends AccountAuthenticatorActivity. My activity extends that, but launches ASyncTask and hence this setAccountAuthenticatorResult should be called from ASyncTask (or, the result of ASyncTask should be passed back to the main thread). How …

Read More
A good tutorial for using AccountManager in Android?

Does anyone know of any good tutorials for using AccountManager in android, basically what I'm trying to do is request a OAuth2 token to use with a google api, any suggestions would be appreciated :)

Read More