in code first, When I want to save 2 related entities (for example Country entity and City entity), first, I create an instance of Country and second create an instance of City and put object of Country to navigation of City, at last SaveChanges.in this process Database, first, create the Country and then put its Id to CountryId field of City entity and save city to database. so now, I want to do the same but with non-related entities. this means I want to send 2 entity (without relationship) to DB, that fist, first one saved and second one get its Id, and use it, at last Save...
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Is it possible to reference additional columns apart from the 'Code' and 'Name' columns when using a domain attribute in an entity?
E.g. A person entity has a code of '1' and a name of 'Smith' and a Gender of 'Male'
In a customer entity there is a domain value referencing the person entity which displays the following 1 {Smith}. The users would like an additional read only attribute which would copy the Gender value of 'Male' into the customer entity based on the domain value. Can this be done using out of the box MDS UI?
I know this is duplicate data and breaks normal form but for usability this would be useful. It would be the equivalent of referencing additional columns in an MS Access drop down list.
Many thanks in advance for any help
This is not possible with the standard UI. One option would be to develop a custom UI where you can handle these kind of requests.
If you want to stick with the standard product I can see a workaround but this is a bit of a "dirty" one.
You can misuse (abuse) the Name attribute of the Person entity by adding a business rule to the Person entity that generates the content of the Name attribute as a concatenation of multiple attributes. You of course need an additional attribute that serves as a place holder for the original Name. The concatenated field will then show in your customer entity.
One question that does come to mind is why a user would like/need to see the gender of a person in a customer list? As you have a separate Person entity I expect you to have multiple persons per customers. What would the gender of one person - even if it is the main contact - matter?
I'm having a little trouble grasping CoreData relationships, i'm note sure which relationship type I should be using between my 2 entities or if my logic is correct.
1) "Person" Entity - attributes such as name, tel, address, country, etc...
2) "CountryList" - attributes such as countryName, countryLat, countryLong, etc..
The CountryList entity is pre populated on first run of the app to include all the countries in the world and their respected data.
Where i'm stuck is do I need a relationship between these two entities?
I will be allowing the user to select a country from the CountryList entity data and wish to store there selection in the country attribute for Person entity.
Do I just take the countryName from CountryList as a string and store it in country from Person? or can I make a relationship between them?
I know a user can only belong to 1 country but a country can have lots of users so is this a one to many relationship? Or is it many to many because lots of users can belong to a country but a country can have loads of users? Confused!
Could someone please enlighten me on this and point me in the right direction in what i should be doing in xcode.
Many Thanks in Advance
Matt
EDIT: Is this correct?
I have made the changes to Entity names etc and think I now have the relationship set correctly.
EDIT 2: Removed country attribute and renamed relationships
Firstly, your "CountryList" entity should be called "Country", since it represents only one country. The fact that you have many of those countries has nothing to do with its name.
After that, it seems just natural to use a relationship, one "Person" has one "Country", but one country can have many persons. Therefore, one-to-many relationship. Using a relationship will simplify many operations you might want to perform (i.e. access all the country information of one person, or get a list of all persons being in one particular country).
Oh, and this might help you understand relationships a bit better: There are no "many-to-many" relationships in CoreData per se. You always define a relation from a source to a target. So if you define a relation from Country to Person, this will be a one-to-many relationship. One country, many persons. You can then define a relationship from Person to Country, which would be a one-to-one relationship. One person, one country. If you defined this as an one-to-many relationship, you would end up with a de facto many-to-many relationship (because on person can have many countries and one country can have many persons). It's not as complex as it appears.
Now, after you've defined your two relationships, you can set them as each others "Inverse Relationship". Do it for one of the relationships, the other one will be set automatically. After you did that, CoreData will for example update a Person's country when you add the person to the country's list.
See https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreData/Articles/cdRelationships.html for further information.
CountryList should just be Country
Then you set a 'many to one' relationship between Person.county and Country
You are using Core Data so you must define relationship between Person and Country if you want to fetch person's country from database.
And in this relationship you may take one to one relationship. As One person will belong to one country only. Of Course a country will have many person but unless you want to show all people related to particular country you do not need one to many relationship..
In case you want to implement one to many relationship this tutorial link maybe helpful to you for understanding one to many relationship..
http://www.theappcodeblog.com/2011/09/29/iphone-app-development-tutorial-core-data-part-2-one-to-many-relationship/
Supose I have following entities created from database tables:
Person
Student
Student include Person as navigation property.
Person has navigation property Country to connect lookup table Country.
In Student metadata, I do put [Include] for navigation property Person.
In Person metadata, I do put [Include] for navigation property Country.
When loading student data, I want to eager loading like to include Person and Country data:
this.ObjectContext.Students.Include("Person").Include("Country");
This was working fine when I use previous version of ASP.NET Data Ria Service. Now when it is changed to WCF Ria Service, above way not working any more.
System give me the error said Country is not a navigation property of Student.
How to resolve this problem?
The error is correct.
Include is on the ObjectQuery<T> you are querying, in this case "Students".
Country is a navigational property of Person, not Student.
Change your code to this:
this.ObjectContext.Students.Include("Person").Include("Person.Country");
Or simply:
this.ObjectContext.Students.Include("Person.Country");
As EF will automatically include "Person" based on the nested include.
You need to remember that Include returns an ObjectQuery<T> based on the ObjectQuery<T> it was invoked upon.
So just because your doing Students.Include("Person"), that doesn't mean at that point, the variable is ObjectQuery<Person> - the variable is still ObjectQuery<Student>.
Suppose I have
table Person
table Employee, which inherits Person.
I want to get a list of Person, regardless if this Person is Employee or not. How do you get entity framework to do that without joining the Employee table? C# is what I'm using. Thanks.
You need to make sure that you don't implicitly use any information from Employee.
If you do this:
var people = Context.People.ToList();
... Then me Entity Framework will initialize new instances of type Employee for those people who happen to be employees. This is because when you store an Employee in the database, you generally expect to get an Employee back when you select the same item.
Nor, for that matter, can you tell the Entity Framework to give you a Person when the stored value is an Employee. The Entity Framework will never give you back an incorrect entity type.
However, if you do just want to read the one table, there is a way to do that: Select the data from Person into a non-entity types, such as an anonymous type:
var people = Context.People.Select(p => new { Name = p.Name }).ToList();
I have situation where I dont want to add records to the relation table.
For example :
I have "TRIPS" entity and it has attribute for "LOCATION_ID", I am filling it when user creates a new TRIP and select a LOCATION from the LOCATIONS entity
In "LOCATIONS" entity I am allowing user to create locations and I am assigning a unique ID to each location.data will not be repeated here.
Is there any way to link the LOCATION_ID into LOCATIONS entity ,so when ever I access a trip(NSManagedObject) it automatically get LOCATIONS entity record (Object) ?
I mean automatically (Manually I can do that)
Thanks,
Raghu
If I understand correctly your question, you simply need to model differently your entities in the Core Data model, as follows. In your TRIPS entity, add LOCATIONS as a relationship, not as a property as you currently do. The relationship may either be to-one or to-many from TRIPS to LOCATIONS, depending on the constraints you want to enforce in your application, and to-one from LOCATIONS to TRIPS.
Once you do this, when you fetch objects from the TRIPS entity, they will also contain a LOCATIONS object (if you decide to use a to-one relationships) or a set of LOCATIONS objects (if you decide for the to-many relationship).