I don't know whether I should be drawing parallels, but unfortunately, that's the only way I can express my issue.
In SQL, suppose we have two tables:
Employee with columns Employee ID, Employee Name, Dept. ID
Deptartment with columns Dept. ID, Dept Name
The Dept ID. in the Employee table is a foreign key with that in the Department table.
Now suppose I want to fetch the following columns:
Employee ID, Employee Name, Department Name
using a SQL such as:
SELECT A.EMPLOYEE_ID, A.EMPLOYEE_NAME, B.DEPT_NAME
FROM EMPLOYEE A, DEPARTMENT B
WHERE A.DEPT_ID = B.DEPT_ID
How would one do this using Core Data in Swift? I guess I'm getting confused by only seeing references to
NSFetchRequest(entityName: entityName)
where the entityName refers to a single entity (table in relational DB lingo)
I'd really appreciate any pointers or examples that can help me clear my doubts.
Thanks
It is certainly possible to create a fetch request that is equivalent to your SQL query. More complex queries can be difficult if not impossible to achieve with a single fetch request. But I recommend trying NOT to draw parallels between CoreData and SQL, at least until you have got to grips with how it works.
To take your example, in the CoreData view of the world, Employee would be an entity with a relationship to another entity, Department. A fetch request based on the Employee entity will return an array of Employee objects, and (assuming you create subclasses of NSManagedObject for each entity) you can access the attributes with simple dot notation:
let employeeName = myEmployeeObject.employeeName
But you can use the same notation to traverse relationships equally easily:
let departmentName = myEmployeeObject.department.departmentName
You don't need to worry about joins, etc; CoreData handles that for you.
Now, suppose you try to do it "the SQL way". You can construct a fetch request based on the Employee entity, but specify "properties to fetch" which likewise traverse the relationship:
let fetch = NSFetchRequest(entity:"Employee")
fetch.propertiesToFetch = ["employeeID", "employeeName", "department.departmentName"]
For this to work, you would need to specify the "resultType" for the fetch request to be DictionaryResultType:
fetch.resultType = .DictionaryResultType
The results from this query would be an array of dictionaries containing the relevant keys and values. But the link with the underlying objects is lost. If you subsequently want to access any details from the relevant Department (or even the Employee), you would have to run a new fetch to get the object itself.
Related
I have a Customer table and another Orders table. Each Customer can have many orders (One to many relationship).
I want to get a Customer object and from it get how many orders he has (the actual order data is not relevant at this point). So as I see it I have 2 options:
create a view with another OrdersCount field - and that will be another object in my system.
in my app, when I need the count get the Customer.Orders.Count - but for my understanding that will cause an extra query to run and pull all the orders from the database to that collection.
Is there a correct way to do such thing?
Thanks
You do need a new type, but you don't need to recreate all relevant properties.
from c in context.Customers
// where ...
select new {
Customer = c,
OrderCount = c.Orders.Count()
}
Update code that looks for e.g. the Name property of an item in the result, to look for Customer.Name.
trying to work out how to do LINQ to Entities query for a many to many relationship which has a junction with fields table.
Below are the Domains models (I am using View models, but keeping it simple for this example).
Student Domain model
StudentID (PK)
ICollection<StudentCourse> StudentCourses
StudentCourse Domain model
StudentCourseID (PK)
StudentID (FK)
CourseID (FK)
ForAdult
ForSeniour
Description
Course Domain model
CourseID (PK)
ICollection<StudentCourse> StudentCourses
Note:
Since the junction table (i.e. StudentCourse) contains fields other than the two foreign keys, EF will create an entity for this.
Lazy Loading
I've got this working for lazy loading. The Navigation properties have been declared with the 'virtual' keyword.
The Query way - works!
var student = (from s in context.Students
where s.StudentID == id
select s).SingleOrDefault<Student>()
The Method way - works!
Student student = context.Students.Find(id);
Projection
BUT, I would prefer to do this with projection, for performance reasons, i.e. less trips to the database.
I'm really stuck on how to write up the LINQ to Entities query to return 1 student with (1 or) many StudentCourses.
I don't understand thoroughly how the Entity should be shaped, if you know what I mean.
For example, I've tried:
var myvar = from s in context.Students
from sc in s.StudentCourses
where s.StudentID == id
select s
What I require is to return an entity of Student with a collection of StudentCourses which could then be assigned to a Student and passed to the View model, then to the View.
Really would appreciate any help, as I've spent alot of time trying to solve this.
Also as a side note, I'm using the SingleOrDefault() method to cast the results of the var (IQueryable I think) to type Student. Is this the preferred way to cast?
You can get EF to eagerly load the related entities by using the Include method.
So using your LINQ example:
var student = (from s in context.Students
where s.StudentID == id
select s).Include("StudentCourses").FirstOrDefault();
And using extension methods:
var student = context.Students.Include("StudentCourses").FirstOrDefault(id);
The Student instance that is returned will have the StudentCourses collection populated with related entities. This should invoke only one SQL query that joins the tables together.
To answer your aside question: I prefer to use FirstOrDefault most of the time as above. The difference is that SingleOrDefault will expect exactly one result and throws an exception otherwise, whereas FirstOrDefault will return null if a student is not found.
Also, as the cast to Student is implicit, you don't need the <Student> type parameter.
I have an entity that has a relationship with another entity. I am able to search on columns that are in the main entity, and include columns from the relationship entity. But I need to be able to filter the list (search) on columns that are not in the relationship entity.
for example
the Invoice Entity contains a customerId property, and is related to the Customer Entity which contains the customerName property
I need to be able to search / filter the grid by customerName.
I am new to entity framework, please help.
thanks
Carl
Your relation is 1->1. In these cases I usually return a custom class to the grid that has all the columns I need, including joins with other tables.
So basically what you need is to create a custom linq query with your resultset.
The mais query should follow this example:
var q = from i in ctx.Invoices
join c in ctx.Customers on i.CustomerID equals c.CustomerID
select new{InvoiceID=i.InvoiceID, InvoiceDate=i.Date, CustomerName=c.Name};
Now, assuming we receive a CustomerName variable with the string to filter by c.Name we could do:
if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CustomerName))
{
q = q.where(c => c.Name.ToLower().Contains(CustomerName.ToLower()));
}
Notice that I'm performing a ToLower() operation and a Contains, this will beahave as a LIKE ingnoring case sensitivity and searching for the string anywhere in the Customer Name.
At the end you'll return the q.ToList() serialized for the jqGrid...
What's the most efficient way to perform this query on a CoreData table? To use the standard employees database model -- I want DISTINCT department ID's for all departments that contain employees with job-description "chef." As it happens, there is only a single table (Employees) relevant here -- I don't actually have a departments table, just department ID's that are repeated.
Given the schema you describe, I would execute a fetch with a predicate (format string) like #"jobDescription LIKE 'chef'" and then use key-value coding to get the unique values from the resulting array:
[result valueForKeyPath:#"#distinctUnionOfValues.departmentID"];
or create a set:
NSSet *deparmentIDs = [NSSet setWithArray:[result valueForKey:#"departmentID"]];
Depending on the size of the problem (how many employees), doing the final step in-memory may prove prohibitive. At this point, you'll have to create a Department entity and do the work to make sure you connect appropriate employees to each department. Then you can do a fetch of Departments with a predicate (format string) like #"ANY employees.jobDescription LIKE 'chef'" to get the departments with chef employees.
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();