After two weeks of beating my head against a concrete wall, a break through of sorts. I ditched the overly complex code from “Android Programming Tutorials”, and replaced it with the SimpleCursorAdapter from Android dev docs. It worked like a charm. Now I can populate a spinner with drug names from the drug model database.
I suppose Murphy was also trying to teach Java OOP by using extended classes to create wrappers and adapters for something that only took 6 lines of code. And such is the problem with all of these how-to books. Nearly every programming book that I have ever read leads you all the way around the subject, without ever actually showing you how to do anything practical. I even posted sample code on his discussion group, he had no more clue than I did, and basically told me to go away.
Anyway, up and running again, now for the fun part, coding the calculation routines.
