Remote Server Searching in RestKit with Core Data

1
votes

I have an application that talks to a remote API using RestKit with an SQLite store for Core Data. When I got to the point of adding server-side searching, I was faced with having to find a way to efficiently display search results. To accomplish this, I used an NSFetchedResultsController that is tied to another in-memory store of the same schema as the SQLite store, and also backed by RestKit. When RestKit searches against the API's search endpoint, it maps the responses back to the in-memory store.

This works really well for what I need, but has now caused another issue. When I get these "transient" objects back from the server, and the user selects one, it needs to be copied into the persistent store at that point (various interactions beyond that point will load additional objects from the server and attempt to tie them back to the original object - which will fail if they're in two different object contexts).

tl;dr

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to copy an entire object (entity and relations) from one core data store to another? Or, is that even necessary? Is there an easier way to accomplish this same task using RestKit?

Would I be better served by changing my search instead, to not use an in-memory store? If so, how should I store these objects?

1
iosobjective-ccore-datarestkit

1 Answers

2
votes

I wouldn't use the in-memory store. I'd just put the search results into the main store and bypass the issues with copying. I'd then have a purge that ran to clean out the old search results that aren't required any more. You might want to tag search results that need to be kept around for some reason. And you can get RestKit to do the purge automatically when each new search is performed (see "Fetch Request Blocks and Deleting Orphaned Objects" in these docs)

For your other question, about tagging. When you make the search request, the search term is in the URL. If you use RKObjectManager and routing then you can access the metadata that is provided to the mapping to get the search term and store it into the returned objects. Something like:

@"@metadata.routing.parameters.searchTerm": @"searchTerm",

See the metadata docs here.