Book Image

Core Data iOS Essentials

Book Image

Core Data iOS Essentials

Overview of this book

Core Data is the essential ingredient in data driven iOS apps. It's used for storing, retrieving, and manipulating application data in databases, XML, and binary formats. It's an essential component for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad apps.Core Data Essentials provides a clear, readable guide to the most useful aspects of Core Data. Built around a realistic example app, the book showcases the most important aspects of Core Data development in the context of a complete, functioning app written in Objective C.The book starts with a tour of how the app works. Then you'll see how to easily display data using the Table View. You'll learn how to develop an appropriate data model that fits the needs of your app, then implement that model as updatable data objects. You'll see how to update data and build relationships between objects and learn how Core Data can work with search, and how to provide your users with friendly data editing features.

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Core Data iOS Essentials
Apr, 2011 | 340 pages
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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Core Data iOS Essentials
Core Data iOS Essentials
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Overview
Overview
Prerequisite
A brief history
Source code
Shall we begin?
2
Understanding Core Data
Understanding Core Data
Core Data
Data Model
Model View Controller (MVC)
Core Data API
Overview of the application: Sales Record System for a Departmental Store
Entity Relationship Diagram
An application output sample
Automatic Master Product Update
Summary
3
Understanding Objective-C Protocol and Table View
Understanding Objective-C Protocol and Table View
Protocol
Creating a sample application using a protocol and a delegate
Introduction to Table View
Creating an application to display Table View cells
Adding names to the Table View
Summary
4
Designing a Data Model and Building Data Objects for Customers
Designing a Data Model and Building Data Objects for Customers
Creating a new project
Designing the data model
Building data objects for the Customer entity
Understanding code of autogenerated files
Summary
5
Creating, Listing, and Deleting Names of Customers
Creating, Listing, and Deleting Names of Customers
Splitting the task into two modules
Creating a module to save and delete a customer's name
Key value coding (KVC)
Implementing the methods of the NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate protocol
Running the project
Summary
6
Creating, Listing, Displaying, and Deleting Records of Customers
Creating, Listing, Displaying, and Deleting Records of Customers
Understanding multiple managed object context
Applying the concept of multiple managed object context in our application
Enhancing our application to save, list, display, and delete customer information
viewDidLoad method
cell AtIndexPath method
didSelectRowAtIndexPath method
addCustomer method
addcustomerController method
Summary
7
Updating and Searching Records of Customers
Updating and Searching Records of Customers
Applying the update feature
Using KVO to know what has been updated
Running the project
Applying search facility
Understanding NSPredicate
Removing the keyboard after selecting a customer's name
Using Predicate Builder for creating a search criterion
Summary
8
Entering, Saving, Listing, and Deleting the Records of the Products Sold to the Customers
Entering, Saving, Listing, and Deleting the Records of the Products Sold to the Customers
Adding the product entity to the Data Model
Relationship
Establishing a relationship between the Customer and the Product entities
Building the data object for the Customer and the Product entities
Entering the information of the products sold to the customers
Creating a module to develop an interface to enter the product information
Developing a module to create a menu for manipulating the product information
Creating a module to connect the Product's menu to the rest of the project
Running the project
Summary
9
Entering, Displaying, and Deleting the Stock
Entering, Displaying, and Deleting the Stock
Adding the MasterProduct entity to the Data Model
Storing the image of the MasterProduct
Building the data object for the MasterProduct entity
Maintaining the MasterProduct information
Summary
10
Editing the Stock Information
Editing the Stock Information
Module to connect the MasterProduct's menu to the rest of the project
Running the application
Module to modify the information of the master product
Summary
11
Displaying the Products for Sale and Updating the Stock
Displaying the Products for Sale and Updating the Stock
Displaying the products available for sale
Updating the stock
Automatically updating the quantity of the product in the MasterProduct entity
Versioning
Migrations
Summary
Appendix
Appendix

Model View Controller (MVC)

iPhone application development uses MVC architecture where M stands for Model, V stands for View, and C for Controller.

  • Model represents the backend data — data model

  • View represents the user interface elements through which the user looks at the contents displayed by the application and can interact with them

  • Controller represents the application logic that decides the type of view to be displayed on the basis of actions taken by the user

Core Data organizes the data model in terms of objects that are easy to handle and manipulate. The finalized objects are stored on a persistent storage. The usual way of representing data models is through classes that contains variables and accessor methods. We don't have to create classes by hand, (for our data models) as Core Data framework provides a special Data Model Design tool (also known as Data Model Editor) for quickly creating an entity relationship model. The terms that we will be frequently using from now onwards...

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