Fetched Property in Core Data

Question

In my core data model, a Person has one or more Cars, specified by the unordered to-many relationship 'Cars'. Frequently, I need to retrieve a Person's cars ordered by datePurchased, or by dateLastUsed.

Until now, I have been adding my own method to Person for carsByDatePurchased. This uses a sort descriptor to sort the NSSet cars and return an NSArray.

Could/should I instead use a Fetched Property for this? I am experiencing some performance overhead using the sort descriptor every time I need the cars in a certain order, even going so far as implementing my own caching of carsByDatePurchased. It looks like the fetched property is cached for me - is that correct?

What are the limitations of a fetched property vs my own implementation?

And crucially, does the fetched property's value persist between executions? If I update the fetched property and save my context, is the value stored for the next time I launch the application?

Answer 1

A fetched property will work, and indeed I used it in my own project with a Post->Comment relationship which needs to be sorted by 'date added index'.

There are a number of caveats: You cannot specify a sort descriptor in the visual editor and have to specify it in code.

I use something like this

    // Find the fetched properties, and make them sorted...
for (NSEntityDescription *entity in [_managedObjectModel entities])
{
    for (NSPropertyDescription *property in [entity properties])
    {
        if ([property isKindOfClass:[NSFetchedPropertyDescription class]])
        {
            NSFetchedPropertyDescription *fetchedProperty = (NSFetchedPropertyDescription *)property;
            NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [fetchedProperty fetchRequest];

            // Only sort by name if the destination entity actually has a "index" field
            if ([[[[fetchRequest entity] propertiesByName] allKeys] containsObject:@"index"])
            {
                NSSortDescriptor *sortByName = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"index"
                                                                           ascending:YES];

                [fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:[NSArray arrayWithObject:sortByName]];
            }
        }
    }
}

In My Post entity I have a fetched property called "sortedComments" which is defined as:

post == $FETCH_SOURCE

where posts have a to-many "comments" relationship and comments have a "post" inverse

In opposition to the other answers here: The benefits of using a fetched property like this, is CoreData takes care of the caching and invalidating the cache as comments for a post or indeed the post that owns them changes.

Answer 2

If you want to gain some performance, do your fetch with an NSFetchedResultsController and have it working with a cache. Next time you perform the same fetch, the fetch will be faster. In your particular name, you will have to cache names. Take a look at the NSFetchedResultsController documentation.

Answer 3

A fetched property is basically a fetch request. I am not aware of ways to add sort descriptors to these properties in the GUI, but I may be wrong. But why not just create a fetch request in your carsByDatePurchased method and provide a sort descriptor? It returns an array or the results (which you can wrap cheaply in an NSOrderedSet with copyItems: flag set to no).

Answer 4

AppDelegate *delegate = [UIApplication sharedApplication].delegate;
NSManagedObjectContext *context = [delegate managedObjectContext];

NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription
                               entityForName:@"DataRecord" inManagedObjectContext:context];
[fetchRequest setEntity:entity];
NSError *error;
fetchedObjects = [context executeFetchRequest:fetchRequest error:&error];
for (NSManagedObject *obj in fetchedObjects) {
    NSLog(@"Name: %@", [obj valueForKey:@"name"]);
    NSLog(@"Info: %@", [obj valueForKey:@"info"]);
    NSLog(@"Number: %@", [obj valueForKey:@"number"]);
    NSLog(@"Create Date: %@", [obj valueForKey:@"createDate"]);
    NSLog(@"Last Update: %@", [obj valueForKey:@"updateDate"]);
}
NSManagedObject *obj = [fetchedObjects objectAtIndex:0];
[self displayManagedObject:obj];
selectedObject = obj;