Core Data Recipes

As an iOS or Mac Developer, you'll eventually want to save some data to a disk, or even upload some data to the network. Luckily, Apple has provided developers with a handy framework called Core Data. Core Data is an amazingly powerful and flexible framework for persisting a graph of objects to a persistent storage mechanism. Unfortunately, this power is somewhat complicated to learn, and even more complicated to get "right".

Core Data Recipes is meant to help take the confusion out of the mysteries of Core Data. By solving common data persistence problems with sample application architectures and code, and walking through them with detailed explainations of why each recipe works for the problem, you can understand a recipe as well as use each one with confidence. Sample code will be provided via the book's github code repostory. All code is (will be) free to use under the MIT license, with proper attribution required for use.

This book is meant for intermediate to advanced iOS and Mac developers. None of the basics of Core Data will be introduced here, and you should have an understanding of the basic objects that comprise Core Data. Apple's reference documentation will be linked for your perusal, but we want to focus on the important issues and problems at hand when harnessing the power and complexity of Core Data.

Some of the topics covered, and common questions answered in this book:

• How do to set up a simple Core Data stack?
• How about perform on background save or fetch operations?
• What about the overall app's data architecture?
• more, TBD

This book is a work in progress. Proposed chapters are listed below, and are subject to change, depending on community feedback. Feedback, and regular access to chapter updates will be handled by leanpub.

Proposed Chapters

The Basic Stack

• The 90% solution
• Table Views, NSFetchedResultsControllers and NSArrayControllers

The Multi Document Stack

• Multiple Models
• Using NSUI/ManagedDocument
• Multiple, Related Stores

The Threaded Stack

• Basic Background Operations
• Multiple Coordinators
• NSOperations
• NSOperationQueues
• GCD with groups
• Background Saving

Importing/Exporting Data

• Import Recipes
• Export Recipes
• Uploading Data

Migrating Data

• Migration Recipes

Third Party/Open Source Libraries

• MagicalRecord

Unit Testing

• Unit Tested Stack Setup
• Testing strategies
• Examples with:

1. Kiwi
2. Specta
3. OCUnit/[Redacted]