I'm very new to Core Data and I have two questions:
I want that all of my Patient entities have property bed which is a value of type bed... Can I create an entity for that too and connect always one patient with one bed?
I wondered if I can do something like every Patient has a property doctors, and that would be a array of doctors "[doctor]". How could I make this.
Thanks, hope you know what I mean, it would be great If someone knows how to do that.
Okay Larme and Joakim Danielson answers my question as comments under my post :)
Their comments:
Yes. The key word you are missing is "relations". You want relationship between your entities. Be it one to one, one to many, many to many. –
Find an online tutorial on learning and using Core Data, many of them handles entity relationships as well –
I'm still unsure whether I understand entity relationships. Just to confirm can I get someone to walk me through what I have created and confirm whether it is correct?
Data Model
So I'm creating a quiz app. This is my understanding of the above :
Category Entity - (e.g. geography) has a many to one relationship with QuizName. A single category can have multiple QuizNames.
A quizName (e.g. rivers in China) can have multiple Question entities. e.g. 'Which of one of these rivers are in China'
A Question can then have 4 possibleAnswers from which the person can choose from.
Have I made the data model correctly?
Thanks.
This model looks good, but Quiz seems better than QuizName.
If --->> is a one-to-many relationship:
Category --->> Quiz --->> Question
A Question entity could either have 4 String properties that represent answers or if each answer has specific attributes than maybe an answer should be yet another entity.
Say you have a couple of Core Data entities .. Student and Exam. These two are initially filled with data from two xml files downloaded from the web.
Now, Students and Exams are separate things... initially there are no connections between them. But after filling out these two entities, I might want to connect certain students to certain exams. Or I might want make all students take a particular exam. But I still want to be able to treat Exams as independent things, which might have no students connected.
I'm unsure how to do this with Core Data. In the data model, you either have a relationship or yo don't. Should I have two different entities for Exam... one for independent exams, and one connected to the student which can be built up from the other Exam enitity?
No, you should not make two entity types.
Just because you have a relationship between two kinds of entities doesn't mean you can't create an object where that relationship is nil.
So, assuming you have a many-to-many relationship between Student and Exam, you might create a new exam by doing something like:
Exam *newExam = [NSEntityDescription
insertNewObjectForEntityForName:#"Exam"
inManagedObjectContext:context];
newExam.course = #"CS 101";
newExam.description = #"Midterm";
You might then later establish a relationship between a student and that exam like:
[newExam.students addObject:aStudent];
(where students is the name of the relationship between Exam and Student
I think you should have a relationship between the two entities (exam and student) but mark it as optional.
I have a couple of Core Data entities... Student and Exam.
Now, the Exams is initially just one object per exam - Maths Exam 3, English Exam 2 etc.
There is a relationship between Students and Exams in my data model (a student can have several exams). But initially, the Exams are just floating free, and not attached to any students.
How would I make a copy of one of the exams and attach it to a student?
If I do something like:
[student addExamsObject:examObject];
...then I think it simply references the original exam to the student, rather than making a copy.
I need a copy because the Exam has a boolean 'hasTaken', which is YES when the student has taken the exam. But if I set that now, it will make it seem like all the students with that exam have taken it.
Clarification: I would rather not restructure my model. The data is taken from a couple of xml files, one each for Students and Exams, which are parsed into the Core Data store. For instance, an Exam object might look like this:
name:Maths 5
class-id:12
year-id:4
student-id:0
..with a Student object looking like
name: Dave
class-id:12
year=id:4
student-id:222
Various rules are meant to guide which exams get attached to which students... for instance if all the Exam's ids are 0 then all students take the exam. If class-id and year-id match, and student-id is 0, then the Exam gets added to students with the same class and year. If the student-ids match, then just that student takes the Exam. etc etc.
I cannot change the way the xml is outputted from the server.
Another issue is that Exam has too-many relationship to a Question entity... in other words, the questions in the Exam. And I have to store answers to the questions that each student gives in an exam.
Edit: I wish people would try to answer my question rather than tell me to restructure my whole program. There are reasons why the data model has been structured like it is.
Edit2: Maybe I will have restructure....
Exam shouldn't have a hasTaken property. Think about it in the real world. An Exam would not know about who has taken it because many people could have taken it. The instance of taking an exam, then, should be a first-class concept in your model.
Consider this:
Exam has many TakenExams, TakenExams belongs to Student http://yuml.me/6627495d
Now the concept of taking an exam is a real object, you can then model assocation metadata as well, such as dateTaken, score, and so on.
Also remember that Core Data expects you to have all of your inverse associations set up as well.
You don't usually copy an entity. (I'm not sure what happens if you call copy on an NSManagedObject... it's not explained in the documentation, as far as I know. Experts can correct me. )
Just create another entity, or write a method which does just that.
I think another way is to make many-to-many relationships between Exam and Student:
create relationships in Exam called studentsToTakeThisExam and studentsWhoTookThisExam.
create relationships in Student called examsToTake and examsAlreadyTaken.
and set up the inverse relationships accordingly.
I would not argue (as You requested) if your modeling is correct or not. The procedure to copy an entity is, in general, quite complex, owing to the fact that, besides attributes, you also need to deal with the entity's relationships and copy them. I can not post here a huge amount of source code showing how to accomplish this, however, I can point you to a book where this issue is described in detail, with all of the source code you need. The book is the one from Marcus Zarra, "Core Data Apple’s API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X" by "The Pragmatic Programmers".
You really don't want to copy an Exam in this situation. You'd end up with lots of identically named Exams which didn't have a relationship with each other, and then you'd be forced to group them together (if you wanted to) by their name.
I'd recommend a new entity (perhaps "ExamSitting"?) which represents a Student sitting an Exam. You could then a to-many from Student to ExamSitting, and a to-many from Exam to ExamSitting. This enables you to have as many attributes on the ExamSitting as you like then (hasTaken, grade and so on).
Edit
Okay, given your clarification, I have a point or two to add (although they may not be what you're looking for). I understand that you're loading from files with a particular structure, but that doesn't necessarily have to dictate your structure.
With the XML files laid out as you now describe, I would still use an Exam - Student - ExamSitting model. If I were to implement it, I'd load all the Students, and then, for each record in the Exams file, I'd create one Exam object, and then a number of ExamSitting objects, one for each Student that fits the criteria defined in the record. As I mention above, this enables you to store more information about each event, such as mark, takenDate and so on.
If you're sure there's no requirement to be able to store additional information at this granularity, you could just create a to-many relationship studentsTakingExam. This could be populated as you load each exam record by querying the loaded Student entities.
I'm working on my first app using Core Data and I need to assign a type (with an associated name attribute) to a couple of entities.
Below is my object model so far.
The room and item types will be updated from time to time over the network.
Is this the best way to implement this using Core Data? Thanks :)
Edit: To try to explain better: for example, rooms may be Bedrooms, Kitchens etc. Items can be Aircon, Security Camera etc. The only difference between the different room and item types is the name text. The list of valid name texts will be updated so I don't want to hard code it in the app. Also, the user can create multiple rooms and items of the same type, which is why they are numbered (roomNumber,itemNumber)
improved Core Data Model Image http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/8458/picture6c.png
Nick, try and avoid the temptation of thinking of Core Data as a database. Design your model from the point of view looking at using the objects in your code.
i.e. your relationship properties are collections (or singluars) of the related thing.. you should rename the relationship JobLocation.JobLocationToRoom as just JobLocation.rooms
And yes, using Core Data will be quite straight forward, but it's hard to give you a definitive answer with such a vague question.
Perhaps my question wasn't clear, but I found the answer in the Apple iPhoneCoreDataRecipes demo code
The relationship I wanted to model is similar to Recipe -> RecipeType.
In addition to the other answers, you don't need to model separate ID attributes. Core Data managed objects automatically have managed object IDs that are handled for you entirely behind-the-scenes by the framework.