SQLiteOpenHelper problem with fully qualified DB path name

You can use the SQLiteOpenHelper with a custom path if you provide a custom ContextClass and if you have write access in the target directory.

public class DatabaseHelper extends SQLiteOpenHelper {
  private static final int DATABASE_VERSION = 3;
    .....

  DatabaseHelper(final Context context, String databaseName)  {
    super(new DatabaseContext(context), databaseName, null, DATABASE_VERSION);
  }
}

And here is the custom DatabaseContext class that does all the magic:

class DatabaseContext extends ContextWrapper {

  private static final String DEBUG_CONTEXT = "DatabaseContext";

  public DatabaseContext(Context base) {
    super(base);
  }

  @Override
  public File getDatabasePath(String name)  {
    File sdcard = Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory();    
    String dbfile = sdcard.getAbsolutePath() + File.separator+ "databases" + File.separator + name;
    if (!dbfile.endsWith(".db")) {
      dbfile += ".db" ;
    }

    File result = new File(dbfile);

    if (!result.getParentFile().exists()) {
      result.getParentFile().mkdirs();
    }

    if (Log.isLoggable(DEBUG_CONTEXT, Log.WARN)) {
      Log.w(DEBUG_CONTEXT, "getDatabasePath(" + name + ") = " + result.getAbsolutePath());
    }

    return result;
  }

  /* this version is called for android devices >= api-11. thank to @damccull for fixing this. */
  @Override
  public SQLiteDatabase openOrCreateDatabase(String name, int mode, SQLiteDatabase.CursorFactory factory, DatabaseErrorHandler errorHandler) {
    return openOrCreateDatabase(name,mode, factory);
  }

  /* this version is called for android devices < api-11 */
  @Override
  public SQLiteDatabase openOrCreateDatabase(String name, int mode, SQLiteDatabase.CursorFactory factory) {
    SQLiteDatabase result = SQLiteDatabase.openOrCreateDatabase(getDatabasePath(name), null);
    // SQLiteDatabase result = super.openOrCreateDatabase(name, mode, factory);
    if (Log.isLoggable(DEBUG_CONTEXT, Log.WARN)) {
      Log.w(DEBUG_CONTEXT, "openOrCreateDatabase(" + name + ",,) = " + result.getPath());
    }
    return result;
  }
}

Update june 2012:
how does this work (@barry question):

Normal android apps have their local database files relative to the app folder. By using a customer context with overwritten getDatabasePath() the database is now relative to a different directory on the sd card.

Update feb 2015:
After replacing my old android-2.2 device with a new android-4.4 device I found out that my solution didn’t work anymore.
Thanks to @damccull-s answer I was able to fix it. I have updated this answer so this should be a working example again.

Update may 2017:

Statistics: This aproach is used in more than 200 github projects