Is XML a good way to organize App data and keep it up to date on the Market?

Question

this should be an easy one for whoever published Android Apps before... Here is my situation:

I'm trying to develop a "city guide" app and I was wondering if my idea of working with .XML files to structure my data (the client provided a .PDF file with pictures, address, tel. no, websites, opening hours of the different destinations) is the best way to go.

I was hoping to be able to write this app as an "interpreter" for this type of .XML and then easily include other cities or destinations in a city by updating that input XML file.

So this is not a technical question, I know how to pull this off, the question is if this is a good way to go? How do you keep an app easily up to date? Would a altered XML trigger a Market wide update notification ?

My research lead me to believe that this is a comfortable way to update a published Android Market app (prior to this inquiry I consulted: http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html

All helpful hints and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Veo.

Answer 1

Once I developed such kind of an app that had to contain the whole information in itself. I structured it in SQLite database that I was shipping along with the application. The file was not directly readable (or at least easy to read) from the assets folder, but every time when the file was altered I copied the sqlite file to the application storage and used it as ordinary application database. The cool thing is that this way I did not have to pay for the parsing of xml every time the application ran.

Several notes here:

• My database grew too big and I had to split it in files of 1MB, because this is the limit for a file in the asset folder. For more info see here:
• The database update mechanism with the database version still worked well.
• When you create the database manually you need to take into account that Android expects one system table to exist in it (it is automatically created if the database is created in Android code). Basically see this answer here for more info on that.