You have to have one per thread, but beyond that ... should you have more? Is it harmful to have more?
For instance, I'm tempted to build my app around having one NSManagedObjectContext per tab, handling the subset of the overall persistent store that appears on that particular tab.
That way, I can have the tab GUI listen to notificataions on "its" context, and ignore others. Asynch network calls will change just one tab's context at a time.
(NB: not using NSFetchController because of the major bugs in that class pre iOS 3.2, and this is a 3.0+ app)
Have I misunderstood how to use NSManagedObjectContext? If so, can anyone point out "good"/"bad" reasons for using additional NSManagedObjectContext instances?
UPDATE: this worked fine for discrete contexts, but when I tried to extrapolate to using multiple contexts on one set of data, to handle temporary changes, it all goes horribly wrong: c.f. question on that topic: How to make/use temporary NSManagedObjects?
It is possible, yes, but be aware that you have to deal with merging them properly and making sure that you don't have stale data between contexts.
Related
I suffered all the consequences of using a single MOC in multiple threads - my app crashes at random points because the MOC is created in the main thread and I also use it to fill the DB in another thread.
Though the code is synchronized (#synchronize) using a global singleton the app crashes.
I read that using a separate MOC for each thread will make things ok but I also read that it is considered also a bad approach to share NSManagedObjects across threads.
My use case is the following:
1)I load and parse XML from a server and during the parsing I insert each new NSManagedObject in the database. This all happens in a separate thread.
2)From the main thread the user interacts with the UI which reads data from the database.
In both threads I use NSManagedObjects. How would you suggest me to fix this? I failed multiple times already.
Most often the app creashed with error suggesting that I am modifying a collection while enumerating it which is not true as the code is synchronized and while I am iterating it no modifying happens and vice versa - while I modify it I don't iterate and I save once I am done.
Use one NSManagedObjectContext per thread. If you communicate between threads, pass the NSManagedObjectID, which is thread safe, and fetch the object again from you thread context. In my apps I sometimes even use one context per controller.
To manage the different contexts, register an Observer for the NSManagedObjectContextDidChangeNotification. Within this notification handling, you pass the notification to each of your contexts via the mergeChangesFromContextDidSaveNotification: method. This method is thread save and makes the context update its state.
After this you have to refresh your views. If you have a table view based application, have a look at NSFetchedResultsController. This helps you update the table automatically with appropriate animations. If you don't use table views, you have to implement the UI update yourself.
If you are only supporting iOS 5 and above you don't need to deal with NSManagedObjectID and merging contexts anymore. You can use the new concurrency types of NSManagedObjectContext instead. Then do your operations within managedObjectContext:performBlock and they will be merged automatically.
See the answer from svena here for more information:
Core Data and Concurrency using NSOperationQueues
Me and my team are currently rookie developers in Objective-C (less than 3 months in) working on the development of a simple tab based app with network capabilities that contains a navigator controller with a table view and a corresponding detailed view in each tab. The target is iOS 4 sdk.
On the networking side, we have a single class that functions as a Singleton that processes the NSURLConnection for each one of the views in order to retrieve the data we need for each of the table views.
The functionality works fine and we can retrieve the data correctly but only if the user doesn't change views until the petition is over or the button of the same petition (example: Login button) is pressed on again. Otherwise, different mistakes can happen. For example, an error message that should only be displayed on the root view of one of the navigation controllers appears on the detailed view and vice versa.
We suspect that the issue is that we are currently handling only a single delegate on the Singleton for the "active view" and that we should change it to support a behavior based on the native Mail app in which you can change views while the data that was asked for in each one of the views keeps loading and updating correctly separately.
We have looked over stackoverflow and other websites and we haven't found a proper methodology to follow. We were considering using an NSOperationQueue and wrapping the NSURLConnections on an NSOperation, but we are not sure if that's the proper approach.
Does anyone have any suggestions on the proper way to handle multiple asynchronous NSURLConnections to update multiple views, both parent and child, almost simultaneously at the whim of the user's interaction? Ideally, we don't want to block the UI or disable the buttons as we have been recommended.
Thank you for your time!
Edit - forgot to add, one of the project restrictions set by our client is that we can only use the native iOS sdk network framework and not the ASIHTTPRequest framework or similar. At the same time, we also forgot to add that we are not uploading any information, we are only retrieving it from the WS.
One suggestion is to use NSOperations and a NSOperationsQueue. The nice thing about this arrangement is you can quickly cancel any in-process or queued work (if say the user hits the back button.
There is a project on github, NSOperation-WebFetches-MadeEasy that makes this about as painless as it can be. You incorporate one class in your classes - OperationsRunner - which comes with a "how-to-use-me" in OperationsRunner.h, and two skeleton NSOperations classes, one the subclass of another, with the subclass showing how to fetch an image.
I'm sure others will post of other solutions - its almost a problem getting started as there are a huge number of libraries and projects doing this. That said, OperationsRunner is a bit over 100 lines of code, and the operations about the same, so this is really easy to read, understand, use, and modify.
You say that your singleton has a delegate. Delegation is inappropriate when multiple objects are interested in the result. If you wish to continue using a singleton for fetching data, you must switch your pattern to be based on notifications. Your singleton will have responsibility for determining which connection corresponds to which task, and choosing an appropriate notification to be posted.
If you still need help with this, let me know, I'll try to post some sample code.
I am new to objective-c/cocoa programming. I am making an application which is to constantly sync with a server and keep its view updated.
Now in a nutshell, heres what I thought of: Initiate an NSTimer to trigger every second or two, contact the server, if there is a change, update the view. Is this a good way of doing it?
I have read elsewhere that you can have a thread running in the background which monitors the changes and updates the view. I never worked with threads before and I know they can be quite troublesome and you need a good amount of experience with memory management to get most out of them.
I have one month to get this application done. What do you guys recommend? Just use an NSTimer and do it the way I though of...or learn multithreading and get it done that way (but keep in mind my time frame).
Thanks!
I think using separate thread in this case would be too much. You need to use threads when there is some task that runs for considerable amount of time and can freeze your app for some time.
In your case do this:
Create timer and call some method (say update) every N seconds.
in update send asynchronous request to server and check for any changes.
download data using NSURLConnection delegate and parse. Note: if there is probability that you can receive a huge amount of data from server and its processing can take much time (for example parsing of 2Mb of XML data) then you do need to perform that is a separate thread.
update all listeners (appropriate view controllers for example) with processed data.
continue polling using timer.
Think about requirements. The most relevant questions, IMO, are :
does your application have to get new data while running in background?
does your application need to be responsive, that is, not sluggish when it's fetching new data?
I guess the answer to the first question is probably no. If you are updating a view depending on the data, it's only required to fetch the data when the view is visible. You cannot guarantee always fetching data in background anyway, because iOS can always just kill your application. Anyway, in your application's perspective, multithreading is not relevant to this question. Because either you are updating only in foreground or also in background, your application need no more than one thread.
Multithreading is relevant rather to the second question. If your application has to remain responsive while fetching data, then you will have to run your fetching code on a detached thread. What's more important here is, the update on the user interface (like views) must happen on the main thread again.
Learning multithreading in general is something indeed, but iOS SDK provides a lot of help. Learning how to use operation queue (I guess that's the easiest to learn, but not necessarily the easiest to use) wouldn't take many days. In a month period, you can definitely finish the job.
Again, however, think clearly why you would need multithreading.
I'm trying to make my first application using Objective C + Core Data, but I'm not sure it's the correct way, as it feels really weird to me.
I have only one data context, which I create at launch time, in the Application Delegate. This data context is used for all the operations (read, write). In another environment (C# and LINQ for example), I try to make these operations as unitary as possible. Here it seems I just have to create the data context once, and work with it without closing it ever (except when the application exits).
I also have an asynchronous operation in which I update this data. Of course, it uses the same data context again. It works, but doesn't feel right.
My Application Delegate keeps a NSArray of the objects contained in Core Data. I use this same NSArray in all my views.
I would actually naturally close the data context once I got all the objects I require, but... aren't the objects always attached to the data context? If I close or release the data context, all these objects will get releases as well, right?
As you can notice, there is something I'm missing here :) Thanks for your help.
The NSManagedObjectContext to which you refer is more of a "scratchpad" than a database connection. Objects are created, amended, destroyed in this working area, and only persisted ("written to the database" if you prefer) when you tell the MOC to save state. You can (and should) init and release MOCs if you are working in separate threads, but the App Delegate makes a MOC available so that all code executing on the main thread can use the same context. This is both convenient, and saves you from having to ensure that multiple MOCs are kept in sync with each other.
By keeping an NSArray of Core Data objects, you are in effect duplicating its functionality. Is there any reason for not working with an NSSet of Core Data objects provided by the MOC?
If you are working asynchronously, then you should not be sharing an NSManagedObjectContext object across threads, as they are not thread-safe. Instead, create one for each thread, but set them to use same NSPersistentStoreCoordinator. This will serialise their access to the persisted data, but you'll need to use notifications to make them each aware of the others changes.
There is a good tutorial/description on how to use Core Data on multiple threads here:
http://www.duckrowing.com/2010/03/11/using-core-data-on-multiple-threads/
1) CORE DATA AND THREADS, WITHOUT THE HEADACHE
http://www.cimgf.com/2011/05/04/core-data-and-threads-without-the-headache/
2) Concurrency with Core Data
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/conceptual/CoreData/Articles/cdConcurrency.html
3) Multi-Context CoreData
http://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/07/multi-context-coredata/
I'm working on a Core Data-based application that has a Mac application acting as a 'server' and an iPhone as a client. Everything is going swimmingly, except I'm running into performance issues.
When the user taps an object, the server must return some objects related to that object (nothing too heavy, usually 3-4 objects) and show a UI to choose some options. This needs to be as fast as possible. The round-trip time to the server, the server pulling the data, formatting it, returning it to the client, and the client creating NSManagedObjects from the data (which cannot be optimized further) is about 200 ms. The code relating to presenting the UI (which cannot be optimized further, again) requires around 150 ms. On an iPod touch 2G running iOS 4.0, the single line of code saving the managed object context after the objects are imported is taking anywhere from 150-200 ms.
To me, this screams that I should be backgrounding the managed object context saving. However, as far as I understand it, that won't really meet my needs. If I want to save the managed object context on a background thread, then all the objects in it must have been created on a background thread in a separate managed object context, so I won't see any speed gain because it will still take 100-200 ms for the save to occur, and I'll be seeing even more overhead because I'll still need to tell my main thread to update it's managed objects from the backgrounded managed object context's save before my view controller sees that it needs to refresh itself.
Am I missing an obvious solution? Is there something about Core Data I could use in this situation that would help? I hate to throw such a general question like this out there, but I'm at a complete loss where to go from here.
Sounds like you need to move the entire server communication to a background thread. If you did that then the entire UI would be responsive no matter how long the communication with the server took.
To do this, you stand up a second NSManagedObjectContext on the background thread connected to the same NSPersistentStoreCoordinator. Then you perform your server communication on that background thread (it might even make sense to use an NSOperation) and save the changes.
Your main thread and therefore main NSManagedObjectContext listens for save notifications and when it receives one it updates the main thread and UI. This will eliminate any freezing you are seeing and the processing time becomes mostly irrelevant.