I'm working on an iPhone app that uses Core Data. I have only one entity called Books, and that entity has the attributes Title, Author, ISBN, Description and Shelf.
I'm working on the book editing view, and want to have a UIPickerView listing all of the unique Shelf rows so that the user can just pick a shelf.
My question is -- how do I get an NSArray of all of the unique Shelf attributes across all of the books in the database? I have access to the managedObjectContext of the Book being edited, so would I use some sort of a fetch request?
Thanks!
You can get a duplicate-less array of available shelves with the array operator #distinctUnionOfArrays.
But IMO it would be a cleaner solution to redesign your data model, so that there are two entities (books and shelves).
You could then create a relationship between book and shelf.
Related
The current scene is this:
There is a category table [category], the number of records is only more than 50, almost no increase, and the modification is rare.
There is a product table [product] currently millions of levels, will always increase.
These two are many-to-many relationships. One category will have more products, and each product will have multiple categories.
The category list is almost not changed, and there are about 1000 products in a category, and the list of a category will be changed not frequently.
Query requirements:
Query all categories (excluding the list of products under the category)
Query the category list by product_id
Query the product list by category_id
Operational requirements:
Modify the product list in category (add/delete a product to a category, sort the product list in a category, so the product list in category needs order.)
How many-to-many design of this kind of scene is better, there are some points:
1. If you follow the design of the SQL database, add a Category<-->Product relation table.
[Question] The order of each category of products is not well maintained. For example, the front-end performs a large-scale adjustment order on a category of products, and then requests it. The Category<-->Product relation table also needs to add an index field to indicate the order, and needs to update a lot of records. It is not particularly friendly to the operation requirements, is there any What can be optimized?
2. The way of NOSQL. Add a products:[] directly to the category to indicate a list of items in this category.
[Evaluation] In the query requirement, there is a requirement to query all categories (excluding the list of products under the category), which will pull out a lot of unnecessary data (products) at one time. Not applicable.
3. Add products:[] in the Category<-->Product association table
[Question] This can meet the operational requirements, but if you want to meet the Query requirments-2 [Query the category list by product_id], how to query it and will there be performance problems?
You need a third table (junction table) to complete the relationship. The keys must be primary keys along with a foreign key constraint.
tblProductCategories
PK product_id FK
PK category_id FK
I am currently trying to model a MongoDB database structure where the entities are very complex in relation to each other.
In my current collections, MongoDB queries are difficult or impossible to put into a single aggregation. Incidentally, I'm not a database specialist and have been working with MongoDB for only about half a year.
To keep it as simple as possible but necessary, this is my challenge:
I have newspaper articles that contain simple keywords, works (oevres, books, movies), persons and linked combinations of works and persons. In addition, the same people appear under different names in different articles.
Later, on the person view I want to show the following:
the links of the person with name and work and the respective articles
the articles in which the person appears without a work (by name)
the other keywords that are still in the article
In my structure I want to avoid that entities such as people occur multiple times. So these are my current collections:
Article
id
title
keywordRelations
KeywordRelation
id
type (single or combination)
simpleKeywordId (optional)
personNameConnectionIds (optional)
workIds (optional)
SimpleKeyword
id
value
PersonNameConnection
id
personId
nameInArticleId
Person
id
firstname
lastname
NameInArticle
id
name
type (e.g. abbreviation, synonyme)
Work
id
title
To meet the requirements, I would always have to create queries that range over 3 to 4 tables. Is that possible and useful with MongoDB?
Or is there an easier way and structure to achieve that?
I have 2 entities. One describes the Section of the TableView (A Month its name, etc.) This entity is related with a one to many relationship to another entity which should describe the rows of the TableView.
I'm a bit confused how to get those entites by an NSFetchedResultController. As far as I now I can only fetch one relationship at the time. So which one should I get to fill the table properly?
If you're using NSFetchedResultsController, you fetch the objects you want to display in the table view.
To get sections, you use NSFetchedResultsController's sectionNameKeyPath property to indicate how to find a section name from one of the fetched objects. This key path is something you could pass to one of the fetched objects via valueForKeyPath: to get the section name. In your case it would require traversing a relationship back to the month entity (or whatever it really is) to get its name. For example if the relationship is called month and the Month entity has a name attribute, you would pass something like #"month.name" as the sectionNameKeyPath argument when you create the fetched results controller.
You can also use the excellent Sensible TableView framework to automatically fetch the Core Data objects and display them in a table view. The framework will also detect if the entities have any relationships and will automatically manage the detail view controllers between them.
I'm currenty working with Core-data for an iPhone project.
But I'm a bit confused about one element.
With Core Data currently you do not need to create the intermediate table when creating many to many relationships (its all handled behind the scenes by core data)
But in my case I actually need some attributes on my many to many relationship!
For example
I have a table called Students
and another table called Lessons
a Student can be in many lessons
and a lesson can have many students
Now a standard many to many relationship will not work for me as I actually need to define more details on the join, i.e. StartDate and LeaveDate.
In a standard sql model for example my join table would be something like
StudentLessons (Studentid, LessonId, StartDate, LeaveDate )
I would need these properties as when i'm querying for information I will need the details from the join to filter my results.
How can I create this in core data and also filter for results?
I've seen folks say that you would actually create the StudentLesson entity manually in core data.
Now if I did this would I just have the attributes (Startdate, LeaveDate) and then a one to many relationship from the Student and then the Lessons table?
Student - > StudentLessons
Lesson - > StudentLessons
I guess I'm a bit confused on how I would go about making sure that the relationships and the content of the relationships are setup correctly. (i.e If I add an Student object to the StudentLessons - how would I then assign/add the Lesson.)
Sorry this is my first time playing with Core Data.
Takes a bit o getting used to when coming from a full on sql background.
You are absolutely right. The correct way to do this is to create a new entity like StudentLessons. Let's call it Attendance. It should have the startDate and endDate, and two relationships.
The relationship to the student can be many-to-many, unless it is foreseeable that startDate and endDate are always different for each student. One Attendance with its dates can have many students in it. One student can have several Attendance duties.
Student <<---->> Attendance
Clearly, the relationship to Lesson should be one-to-many. One Lesson can have different Attendance configurations, with different dates. But each Attendance belongs only to one Lesson.
Lesson <---->> Attendance
To address your question, you can make the Attendance attribute of Lesson non-optional (and vice versa), this way it will ensure that each Lesson has at least one Attendance with appropriate dates, and each Attendance has exactly one Lesson.
I think your can remove the link between Student and Lesson. Just assign an Attendance rather than a lesson. If you want a Lesson assigned to a Student without dates, just allow Attendance to have NULL as those properties.
TheTiger,
Just because Core Data will create a join table for you, that doesn't mean you have to use it. Maintaining which student succeeds with which lesson is just the same except you will create the intermediate entity and then use the appropriate setters to build the relationships.
You will have to use more key paths and do relationship prefetching but those are straightforward to do.
Andrew
So I have this problem I am trying to solve - I wonder if anyone can comment on/help me with the approach. The thing is, I have it partly solved, but with the rest I'm not quite sure.
Here's the deal:
I have a fairly large DB online which I want to load on first start of the App. After that I am only going to load it if new versions exist.
I use an xml parser to parse the data and enter all the data to my data model. The database consists of thousands of products, all described by various attributes.
Anyway, it's easy for me to save thousands of products in a database, then retrieving the data on demand.
I have a problem of how to categorize them and how to save the category data. There is a main category i.e. Hi-Fi which has several subcategories- let's say 'stereo', 'tuner', 'phone' and so on....
How to best save this info, that category a has 15 subcategories and each of these categories in turn has 30 products while securing performance and keeping process-time at a minimum. I don't want to check all 2000 Products whether I need to show them in a certain table view each time I open a new table view.
Any hints on the apporach are appreciated.
You'll need two entities: Product and Category.
Category has a to-many relationship called subcategories with a target entity of Category. The inverse relationship can be called parentCategory. Category also has a to-many relationship called products. Product would have an inverse relationship called category (or categories if a product can belong to multiple categories)
Now, you can get all the products for a given category by checking its products property. If you want to include all the products in the subcategories, you can do a fetch request with a predicate like this:
[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:#"category == %# OR category IN %#", category, category.subcategories];
I think you can solve it by having a Core Data modal consisting of three entities: Product, Category and SubCategory.
Product has a relationship category with destination Category and a relationship subcategory with destination SubCategory.
Category has a to-many relationship products with destination Product and a to-many relationship subcategories with destination SubCategory.
SubCategory has a to-many relationship products with destination Product and a relationship category with destination Category.
When defining these relationships remember to assign the Inverse relationships as well.
Now you get a list of all products belonging to a specific category by just loading the Category in question and accessing the products property. It should also be possible to use NSFetchRequest for Product with a predicate specifying which category you want. Which is best regarding performance and memory requirements I can't say so you just have to test which approach works best.