If my objective is to create a cloud backup that a user can restore if they accidentally delete my app or a bug causes data loss (no need to share data across devices), what's the simplest option to backup user CoreData daily?
(Note: The occasional full iPhone backup isn't sufficient)
When I read about CloudKit I see things like:
You might wonder why you should choose CloudKit over Core Data, other commercial BaaS (Back end as a Service) offerings, or even rolling your own server...
But that's a problem because I would like to continue using CoreData! I do not want the user to depend on the cloud for data. I don't want syncing problems, online/offline issues, etc.
I would also like to avoid having the user login or create an account. According to Ray Wenderlich:
Since CloudKit uses the iCloud credentials entered when the device is set up (or entered after set up via the Settings app), there’s no need to build complicated login screens.
I see some apps use Facebook login but I'd even like to avoid that! So can I use CloudKit to avoid login screens but also still use CoreData?
Although code answers are great, just a general answer on what API/design-pattern is used for this type of functionality would suffice.
Yes you can use CloudKit at the same time as CoreData to do this and it does avoid the login and cost overheads of many other cloud alternatives.
However as the two data models are not related, if your data is complex there will be a significant amount of code necessary to covert between them whenever the user selects to backup or restore.
Are you sure relying on the normal iOS backup functionality is not sufficient?
Related
I am devloping an app using CloudKit and CoreData. I currently have the app setup so that when the user changes, I use a different locaton for the persistant store. If the user loggs back in, I can switch back to that persistant store and pick up right where they left off and not have to redownload data up to that point as well as not loose any changes that might not have been synced when the account changed.
My question is I am now second guessing if this is the right approach (from a data security standpoint) and want to know if there is Apple guidance in this scenario or what other developers might think. Should I just purge the data when the accont changes (and if there is data loss, not worry about it).
Is there anything I can do about unsynced data when an account changes?
I appreciate any input.
This is a curious use case. I think the answer depends on a few things.
If people are sharing devices and signing in/out of the app, and the app data they are saving is sensitive (PII, financial data, etc.), then I would purge the data and download the new user’s stuff from CloudKit.
If people aren’t sharing devices, and the amount of data you need to pull down is pretty big (several hundred MB or more), then I would keep the local cache in Core Data.
I hope that helps.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issues with iCloud and Core Data and how Apple's APIs are currently broken in iOS 5 and possibly iOS 6.
Is it possible, given the current state of Apple's Core Data API, to reliably sync across multiple devices using iCloud?
If so, how would you do this? If not, please recommend an alternative approach.
This blog post will lead you to a chain of recent articles about the travails of developers attempting this approach.
From my own understanding and experience, I believe it is doable, but don't buy into the idea that you will get anything "for free". Depending on your data model, you may be better off syncing your whole persistent store as a document rather than using the documented core data / iCloud approach.
You may have better luck if you're already comfortable with Core Data. Just be sure you think through how to handle several important cases.
One is what to do if the user signs out of their iCloud account. When this happens, the local ubiquitous persistent store is deleted. If it makes sense for the user to still have access to their data, you'll need to manage a copy in local storage, and then manage resynchronizing when they sign back in.
Another is that changes can apparently be quite slow to propagate by default, so you may want to consider an alternative mechanism, such as the key value store, to quickly propagate sufficient information to avoid a bad user experience.
Conflict management is perhaps the most challenging (depending on your model). While the framework provides a mechanism to inform you of conflicts, you are on your own for providing a mechanism to resolve them, and there are reports that the conflict notifications may not be reliable (see linked articles), which seems strongly linked to the lag in updating.
In short, if you go into this understanding that the actual support is pretty bare bones and that you'll need to code very defensively, you may have a chance. There aren't any good recipes out there, so if you do make it work, please come back and tell us what works!
It depends on what you want to do. There are two types of Core Data-iCloud integration, as described here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/DataManagement/RN-iCloudCoreData/_index.html
There are broadly speaking two types of Core Data-based application that integrate with iCloud:
Library-style applications, where the application usually has a single persistent store, and data from the store is used throughout the application.
Examples of this style of application are Music and Photos.
Document-based applications, where different documents may be opened at different times during the lifetime of the application.
Examples of this style of application are Keynote and Numbers.
If you're using the library-type, this article is the first of a series that goes into a lot of the problems that will come up: http://mentalfaculty.tumblr.com/post/23163747823/under-the-sheets-with-icloud-and-core-data-the-basics.
You can also check out sessions 218 (for document-based) or 227 (for library-style) of this year's wwdc.
As of iOS 7, the best solution is probably the Ensembles framework: https://github.com/drewmccormack/ensembles
Additionally, there is a promising project which will essentially allow you to do the same thing using a different cloud service.
Here is a link to the repository: https://github.com/nothirst/TICoreDataSync
Project description:
TICoreDataSync is a collection of classes to enable synchronization via the Cloud (including Dropbox) of Core Data-based applications (including document-based apps) between any number of clients running under Mac OS X or iOS. It's designed to be easy to extend if you need to synchronize via an option that isn't already supported.
Reasons for why iCloud is not currently reliable:
"Sometimes, iCloud simply fails to move data from one computer to another."
"Corrupted baselines are [a] common obstacle.... There is no recovery from a corrupted baseline, short of digging in to the innards of your local iCloud storage and scraping everything out, and there is no visible indication that corruption has occurred — syncing simply stops."
"Sometimes, when initializing the iCloud application subsystem, it will simply return an opaque internal error. When it fails, there’s no option to recover — all you can do is try again (and again…) until it finally works."
"[W]hen you turn off the “Documents & Data” syncing option in the iCloud system preferences, the iCloud system deletes all of your locally stored iCloud data[.]"
When you sign out of iCloud, the system moves your iCloud data to a location outside of your application’s sandbox container, and the application can no longer use it.
"In some circumstances (and we haven’t been able to figure out which, yet), iCloud actually changes the object class of an item when synchronizing it. Loosely described, the object class determines the type of the object in the database[.]"
"In some cases (again, not all the time), iCloud may do one of the following:
Owner relationships in an item’s data will point to the wrong owner;
Owner items get lost in synchronization and never appear on computers other than the one on which they were created. (This leads to the item never appearing in the UI on any other machine.) When this happens, bogus relationships get created between blob items and an arbitrary unrelated owner."
"Sometimes (without any apparent consistency or repeatability), the associated data for an object (for example, the PDF data for a PDF item, or the web archive data for a Web Archive item) would simply fail to show up on the destination machine. Sometimes it would arrive later (much later — minutes or hours)."
Quoted and paraphrased from these sources:
http://www.imore.com/debug-12-icloud-core-data-sync
http://rms2.tumblr.com/post/46505165521/the-gathering-storm-our-travails-with-icloud-sync
Note: I have seen one article where the author mentions getting it to work for iOS 6+, but they don't provide any examples: http://zaal.tumblr.com/post/46718877130/why-you-want-to-use-core-data-icloud-sync-if-only-it
As a reference, here are Apple's docs on iCloud + Core Data:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/DataManagement/RN-iCloudCoreData/
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/General/Conceptual/iCloudDesignGuide/Chapters/DesignForCoreDataIniCloud.html
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/Conceptual/CoreDataVersioning/vmCloud/vmCloud.html
And here is an example app:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/General/Conceptual/iCloud101/Introduction/Introduction.html
The Apple developer tutorial on using the iCloud API to manipulate documents might be a good place to start.
Your Third iOS App introduces you to the iCloud document storage APIs. You use these APIs to store and manipulate files in a user’s iCloud storage.
As someone that experienced the pain of iCloud while trying to prototype iCloud enabling one of our CoreData apps, Simperium looks very promising, but I'm interested in seeing how it handles some of the sharp edges.
One issue I came across was how to gracefully handle bootstrapping data when the application starts up. The first time a user launches our app, we will load some default data into our CoreData database. If a user launches the app first on the iPhone and then later on the iPad, they will end up getting the bootstrap data duplicated on both devices because of syncing. With iCloud, the solution was to hook into the iCloud merge process.
How would I handle this with Simperium?
There are at least a couple ways to do this.
You can hardcode the simperiumKey for each seeded object. For example, in a notes app, if every new user gets a welcome note, you can locally create that note with the simperiumKey of welcomeNote. This will ensure that only one welcome note will ever exist in that user's account (on any device). With this approach, there can be some redundant data transfer, so it's best if there's not a large amount of seeded data. On the other hand, this approach is good if you want data to be immediately available to new users even if they're offline when they first launch your app.
With Simperium, you also have the option to use a server process. You can seed new user accounts with data by using a Python or Ruby listener that runs some code when accounts are created. This is a good approach if there's a large amount of data, but has the disadvantage that users need to be online before the seeded data will transfer (and of course the transfer itself will take some time).
There are subtleties with these approaches. With the first approach, using the welcomeNote example, if your user deletes the welcomeNote and subsequently reinstalls your app in the future, the welcomeNote will get resurrected (but never duplicated) because it's being created locally. This is often acceptable. With the second approach, the welcomeNote would be seeded once and only once, so it will never get resurrected even if your app is reinstalled.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issues with iCloud and Core Data and how Apple's APIs are currently broken in iOS 5 and possibly iOS 6.
Is it possible, given the current state of Apple's Core Data API, to reliably sync across multiple devices using iCloud?
If so, how would you do this? If not, please recommend an alternative approach.
This blog post will lead you to a chain of recent articles about the travails of developers attempting this approach.
From my own understanding and experience, I believe it is doable, but don't buy into the idea that you will get anything "for free". Depending on your data model, you may be better off syncing your whole persistent store as a document rather than using the documented core data / iCloud approach.
You may have better luck if you're already comfortable with Core Data. Just be sure you think through how to handle several important cases.
One is what to do if the user signs out of their iCloud account. When this happens, the local ubiquitous persistent store is deleted. If it makes sense for the user to still have access to their data, you'll need to manage a copy in local storage, and then manage resynchronizing when they sign back in.
Another is that changes can apparently be quite slow to propagate by default, so you may want to consider an alternative mechanism, such as the key value store, to quickly propagate sufficient information to avoid a bad user experience.
Conflict management is perhaps the most challenging (depending on your model). While the framework provides a mechanism to inform you of conflicts, you are on your own for providing a mechanism to resolve them, and there are reports that the conflict notifications may not be reliable (see linked articles), which seems strongly linked to the lag in updating.
In short, if you go into this understanding that the actual support is pretty bare bones and that you'll need to code very defensively, you may have a chance. There aren't any good recipes out there, so if you do make it work, please come back and tell us what works!
It depends on what you want to do. There are two types of Core Data-iCloud integration, as described here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/DataManagement/RN-iCloudCoreData/_index.html
There are broadly speaking two types of Core Data-based application that integrate with iCloud:
Library-style applications, where the application usually has a single persistent store, and data from the store is used throughout the application.
Examples of this style of application are Music and Photos.
Document-based applications, where different documents may be opened at different times during the lifetime of the application.
Examples of this style of application are Keynote and Numbers.
If you're using the library-type, this article is the first of a series that goes into a lot of the problems that will come up: http://mentalfaculty.tumblr.com/post/23163747823/under-the-sheets-with-icloud-and-core-data-the-basics.
You can also check out sessions 218 (for document-based) or 227 (for library-style) of this year's wwdc.
As of iOS 7, the best solution is probably the Ensembles framework: https://github.com/drewmccormack/ensembles
Additionally, there is a promising project which will essentially allow you to do the same thing using a different cloud service.
Here is a link to the repository: https://github.com/nothirst/TICoreDataSync
Project description:
TICoreDataSync is a collection of classes to enable synchronization via the Cloud (including Dropbox) of Core Data-based applications (including document-based apps) between any number of clients running under Mac OS X or iOS. It's designed to be easy to extend if you need to synchronize via an option that isn't already supported.
Reasons for why iCloud is not currently reliable:
"Sometimes, iCloud simply fails to move data from one computer to another."
"Corrupted baselines are [a] common obstacle.... There is no recovery from a corrupted baseline, short of digging in to the innards of your local iCloud storage and scraping everything out, and there is no visible indication that corruption has occurred — syncing simply stops."
"Sometimes, when initializing the iCloud application subsystem, it will simply return an opaque internal error. When it fails, there’s no option to recover — all you can do is try again (and again…) until it finally works."
"[W]hen you turn off the “Documents & Data” syncing option in the iCloud system preferences, the iCloud system deletes all of your locally stored iCloud data[.]"
When you sign out of iCloud, the system moves your iCloud data to a location outside of your application’s sandbox container, and the application can no longer use it.
"In some circumstances (and we haven’t been able to figure out which, yet), iCloud actually changes the object class of an item when synchronizing it. Loosely described, the object class determines the type of the object in the database[.]"
"In some cases (again, not all the time), iCloud may do one of the following:
Owner relationships in an item’s data will point to the wrong owner;
Owner items get lost in synchronization and never appear on computers other than the one on which they were created. (This leads to the item never appearing in the UI on any other machine.) When this happens, bogus relationships get created between blob items and an arbitrary unrelated owner."
"Sometimes (without any apparent consistency or repeatability), the associated data for an object (for example, the PDF data for a PDF item, or the web archive data for a Web Archive item) would simply fail to show up on the destination machine. Sometimes it would arrive later (much later — minutes or hours)."
Quoted and paraphrased from these sources:
http://www.imore.com/debug-12-icloud-core-data-sync
http://rms2.tumblr.com/post/46505165521/the-gathering-storm-our-travails-with-icloud-sync
Note: I have seen one article where the author mentions getting it to work for iOS 6+, but they don't provide any examples: http://zaal.tumblr.com/post/46718877130/why-you-want-to-use-core-data-icloud-sync-if-only-it
As a reference, here are Apple's docs on iCloud + Core Data:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/DataManagement/RN-iCloudCoreData/
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/General/Conceptual/iCloudDesignGuide/Chapters/DesignForCoreDataIniCloud.html
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/Conceptual/CoreDataVersioning/vmCloud/vmCloud.html
And here is an example app:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/General/Conceptual/iCloud101/Introduction/Introduction.html
The Apple developer tutorial on using the iCloud API to manipulate documents might be a good place to start.
Your Third iOS App introduces you to the iCloud document storage APIs. You use these APIs to store and manipulate files in a user’s iCloud storage.
I store some data in my iOS app directly in a local .sqlite file. I chose to do this instead of CoreData because the data will need to be compatible with non-Apple platforms.
Now, I'm trying to come up with the best way to sync this file over iCloud. I know you can't sync it directly, for many reasons. I know CoreData is able to sync its DBs, but even ignoring that using CD would essentially lock this file into Apple platforms (I think? I've only looked into CD a bit), I need the iCloud syncing of this file to work across ALL of iCloud's supported platforms - which is supposed to include Windows. I have to assume that there won't be any compatibility for the CoreData files in the Windows API. Planning out the best way to accomplish this would be a lot easier if Apple would tell us any more than "There will be a Windows API [eventually?]"
In addition, I'll eventually need to implement at least one more sync service to support platforms that iCloud does not. It would be helpful, though not required, if the method I use for iCloud can be mostly reused for future services.
For these reasons, I don't think CoreData can help me with this. Am I correct in thinking this?
Moving on from there, I need to devise an algorithm for this, or find an existing one or an existing 3rd party solution. I haven't stumbled across anything yet. However, I have been mulling over a couple possible methods I could implement:
Method 1:
Do something similar to how CoreData syncs sqlite DBs: send "transaction logs" to iCloud instead and build each local sqlite file off of those.
I'm thinking each device would send a (uniquely named) text file listing all the sql commands that that device executed, with timestamps. The device would store how far along in each list of commands it has executed, and continue from that point each time the file is updated. If it received updates to multiple log files at once, it would execute each command in timestamp order.
Things could get 'interesting' efficiency-wise once these files get large, but it seems like a solvable problem.
Method 2:
Periodically sync a copy of the working database to iCloud. Have a modification timestamp field in every record. When an updated copy of the DB comes through, query all the records with newer timestamps than some reference time and update the record in the local DB from the new data.
I see many potential problems with this method:
-Have to implement something further to recognize record deletion.
-The DB file could get conflicts. It might be possible to deal with them by handling each conflict version in timestamp order.
-Determining the date to check each update from could be tricky, as it depends on which device the update is coming from.
There are a lot of potential problems with method 2, but method 1 seems doable to me...
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be the best course of action? Any better ideas than my "Method 1" (or reasons why it wouldn't work)?
Try those two solutions from Ray Wenderlich:
Exporting/Importing data through mail:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/1980/how-to-import-and-export-app-data-via-email-in-your-ios-app
File Sharing with iTunes:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/1948/how-integrate-itunes-file-sharing-with-your-ios-app
I found it quite complex but helped me a lot.
Both method 1 and method 2 seem doable. Perhaps a combination of the two in fact - use iCloud to send a separate database file that is a subset of data - i.e. just changed items. Or maybe another file format instead of sqlite db - XML/JSON/CSV etc.
Another alternative is to do it outside of iCloud - i.e. a simple custom web service for syncing. So each change gets submitted to a central server via JSON/XML over HTTP, and then other devices pull updates from that.
Obviously it depends how much data and how many devices you want to sync across, and whether you have access to an appropriate server and/or budget to cover running such a server. iCloud will do that for "free" but all it really does is transfer files. A custom solution allows you to define your syncing model as you wish, but you have to develop and manage it and pay for it.
I've considered the possibility of transferring a database file through iCloud but I think that I would run into classic problems of timing - slow start for the user - and corrupted databases if the app is run on multiple devices simultaneously. (iPad/iPhone for example).
Sooo. I've had to use the transaction logs method. It really is difficult to implement, but once in place, seems ok.
I am using Apple's SharedCoreData sample as the base for this work. This link requires an Apple Developer Account.
I did find a much much better solution from Tim Roadley however this only works for IOS and I needed both IOS and MacOS.
rant> iCloud development really has to get easier and more stable! /rant