Android Room Persistence Library: Upsert

Question

Android's Room persistence library graciously includes the @Insert and @Update annotations that work for objects or collections. I however have a use case (push notifications containing a model) that would require an UPSERT as the data may or may not exist in the database.

Sqlite doesn't have upsert natively, and workarounds are described in this SO question. Given the solutions there, how would one apply them to Room?

To be more specific, how can I implement an insert or update in Room that would not break any foreign key constraints? Using insert with onConflict=REPLACE will cause the onDelete for any foreign key to that row to be called. In my case onDelete causes a cascade, and reinserting a row will cause rows in other tables with the foreign key to be deleted. This is NOT the intended behavior.

Answer 1

Just an update for how to do this with Kotlin retaining data of the model (Maybe to use it in a counter as in example):

//Your Dao must be an abstract class instead of an interface (optional database constructor variable)
@Dao
abstract class ModelDao(val database: AppDatabase) {

@Insert(onConflict = OnConflictStrategy.FAIL)
abstract fun insertModel(model: Model)

//Do a custom update retaining previous data of the model 
//(I use constants for tables and column names)
 @Query("UPDATE $MODEL_TABLE SET $COUNT=$COUNT+1 WHERE $ID = :modelId")
 abstract fun updateModel(modelId: Long)

//Declare your upsert function open
open fun upsert(model: Model) {
    try {
       insertModel(model)
    }catch (exception: SQLiteConstraintException) {
        updateModel(model.id)
    }
}
}

You can also use @Transaction and database constructor variable for more complex transactions using database.openHelper.writableDatabase.execSQL("SQL STATEMENT")