Skip to main content

iOS Persisting Data Part 2

So I started trying to find a way to save data in my app. I have been watching this PluralSight course to help me along, Core Data Fundamentals, by Brice Wilson. Having thoughts of EF Code first in my head I thought things were going to be fairly straight forward after setting up my Model objects and then a connection to the data store. However, after getting those pieces setup the course shows some simple object creation and data retrieval. This ended up being nothing like I expected. Every call to and from the data store used strings to find objects and set or get properties. Yikes! I envisioned defining an object and then being able to use intellisense for that object and all of its properties. There is more to the course so hopefully we will get to that point, but if that is the case, this seems like an awful way to introduce using Core Data.

Continuing on with the course I find that the reason my original objects do not provide any intellisense is that they are NSManagedObject objects. This would be similar to casting all of the EF objects to IEntity, the IEntity interface wouldn't have knowledge of the properties of a concrete implementation. So it appears that I will need to make a subclass of NSManagedObject for each object that I want to store and set my model's mapping to that class instead of leaving it as the default.

Creating these subclasses ends up being super easy. Because I already have my Model objects defined, all I need to do is add new classes of type NSManagedObject subclasses. I am wizarded through choosing my Model and the objects that I want to subclass. This creates a class for each of my objects with property definitions for all of their properties. Then using the new classes I can set and get these objects and properties through intellisense just as a would any other defined class. I really do not see at this point why he showed off the other method first as this is a much more simple way to interact with objects, you don't need to remember what the property name was or worry about misspellings when the IDE can autocomplete them for you.

Coming back to my thoughts of this being like EF Code-First, it turns out to be more like EF DB-First. You need to have your Model defined and have its properties defined, then Core Data can generate a file for that class with its properties. If you want to extend that class then you need to use a Category, which appears to be sort of like a Partial class. You are able to create a new Interface that adds to an existing Interface by using the + symbol. Thats a little weird, and probably going to take some getting used to.

So using CoreData isn't exactly like using an ORM, although there are some similarities. There are some oddities that I may just not know the best approach for yet, like fetching an object via its string name instead of asking for the object that maps to that store. (Update, thanks to David, I was able to use: NSStringFromClass([ClassType class]), as a way to replace the "Magic Strings" I had littered throughout my project calling my objects.  This provides me with a much safer way of dealing with objects from the data store.

Now I have data being persisted into a SQLite DB. I am able to retrieve that data and iterate over it. Next up will be doing some logic with these objects, which means back to Testing and TDD, Hooray!

Comments

  1. When you sign up at a web-based on line casino and deposit a typical sum, it’s 카지노 사이트 anticipated that you're one way or the other|by some means} rewarded. The on-line casinos on this record recognize this and their customers’ belief. That’s why these casinos supply quantity of} welcome bonuses, with a range of choices, so everybody can discover a bonus that can satisfy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Converting a Large AngularJS Application to TypeScript Part 1

I work on a project that uses AngularJS heavily. Recently we wondered if using a preprocesser like CoffeeScript or TypeScript for our JavaScript would be beneficial. If our team is going to switch languages, we would need to be able to convert existing code over without much pain and we would have to find enough value in switching that it would be worth the conversion. I had read an article that stated that because TypeScript is a SuperSet of JavaScript, you could convert a plain JavaScript file to TypeScript by changing the extension to .ts and not much else would need to change. I wanted to test out this claim, so I took a file that I was familiar with, an Angular Controller, and tried to convert it to TypeScript to see how much effort it would take and then try to figure out where we would benefit from using TypeScript. This is what the controller JavaScript file looked like to start out with: ( function () { 'use strict' ; angular .module( 'app'...

Interns: Taking off the training wheels

My intern team has been working for several weeks now on our new website. We have already completed one deployment to production and are finalizing our second one. We started with a plan to release often adding small bits of functionality as we go and so far that plan has been working really well. We already feel like we have accomplished a lot because we have completed many of our project's requirements and should easily be able to complete the rest giving us time to do even more than just the original requirements. One of the things I have had some difficulty balancing has been how much to lead the interns and how much to let them figure out on their own. In deciding what our team process should be and how we should allocate our time, I think it was important for me to do more leading. I saw some deficiencies in how we were currently working and brought up some ideas for how we could address them. We had moved into spending all our time just working through stories and did not ...

My idea for Hearthstone to add more deck slots

Recently someone asked the Blizzard developers for more slots for decks in the game Hearthstone. The response was that they are talking about it and looking into it, but no decision has been made yet. One of the concerns over adding deck slots is that it could complicate the UI for Hearthstone and make it more difficult for new players to understand. I have what I think would be a good solution to add more deck slots without increasing the learning curve for the game much if at all. First I would take a look at the current selection screen for starting to play a game. It defaults to showing the decks that are custom built by the player if they have any custom decks, and there is an option to page over to the basic decks. This basic deck screen is perfect for how I would change this process. Instead of having 2 pages of decks, 1 for basic and 1 for custom, you would just see the select a Hero screen. Then once you selected the Hero you wanted, you would see all of the decks that ...