Book Image

Learning SQLite for iOS

By : Gene Da Rocha
Book Image

Learning SQLite for iOS

By: Gene Da Rocha

Overview of this book

The ability to use SQLite with iOS provides a great opportunity to build amazing apps. Apple's iOS SDK provides native support for SQLite databases. This combination offers the potential to create powerful, data-persistent applications. This book starts with the architecture of SQLite database and introduces you to concepts in SQL . You will find yourself equipped to design your own database system, administer it, and maintain it. Further, you will learn how to operate your SQLite databases smoothly using SQL commands. You will be able to extend the functionality of SQLite by using its vast arsenal of C API calls to build some interesting, exciting, new, and intelligent data-driven applications. Understand how Xcode, HTML5, and Phonegap can be used to build a cross-platform modern app which can benefit from all these technologies - all through creating a complete, customizable application skeleton that you can build on for your own apps.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning SQLite for iOS
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

iOS with SQLite


Out of the hundreds of thousands of apps in all the app stores, it would be difficult to find the one that does not require a database of some sort to store or handle data in a particular way. There are different formats of data and datafeeds, but they all require some sort of temporary or permanent storage. A small amount of data may not be applicable, but a medium or large amount of data will require a storage mechanism, such as a database to assist the app.

Using a database such as SQLite with iOS will enable developers to use their existing skills to run their DBMS. For SQLite, there is a C-library that is embedded and available to use with iOS with the Xcode IDE.

Apple fully supports SQLite, which uses an include statement as a part of the library call, but developers can also use FMDB, which is a cocoa/objective-C wrapper around SQLite.

A few advantages of SQLite are that it is fast, lightweight, reliable, uses existing SQL knowledge, is supported by Apple on Mac OS and iOS and by many developers, as well as being integrated without much outside involvement.

The SQLite 3 library is under the general tab once the main project name is highlighted on the left-hand side of the page. Then, at the bottom of the page, within Linked Frameworks and Libraries, click on the + for a modal window to appear. Enter the word sqlite and select the libsqlite3.dylib library, as shown in the following screenshot:

In effect, it is the C++ wrapper, called the libsqlite3.dylib library, within the framework section that allows the API to work with SQLite commands.

Before any SQL processes can take place, the database should be opened and ready for querying, and, upon the success of data retrieval, the constant called SQLITE_OK should be set to 0.

Once the C++ wrapper is used and the access to SQLite commands is available, it is an easier process to use SQLite with iOS.

Tip

Downloading the example code

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