Sort fetch request based on relationship attribute - ios

Let's say I have to entities; Item and LocalizableString. The LocalizableString entity have two attributes; string and locale. The Item entity have a to-many relationship to LocalizableString called localizedTitles. Where there's one string entity per "locale".
Now, in my app I have some context/setting that determines what locale I want to use when showing the UI. So let's say I have a UITableViewController with an NSFetchedResultsController handling the data flow.
My question is: can I sort the Item entities based on the LocalizableString's string property where locale is for example en? And can I do this in the fetch request, not after having fetched all items?

Sure you can do that, but you do not have to fetch any particular locale upfront. Your fetched results controller would just fetch the Item objects, and you can then refer to the correct string as you need it.
One way to implement this is to add a convenience function to the Item class, something like the following
func titleWithLocale(identifier: String) -> String? {
if let title = self.localizedTitles.filter
{ $0.locale == identifier }
.first as? LocalizableString {
return title.string
}
return nil
}
Most likely you will have to tweak this code to conform to the strict typing of Swift, but you get the idea.
If you need to sort by the title string, perhaps you need a different approach. If you know that each Item has a localized title in the respective locale you can fetch the LocalizedTitle entity with a predicate the filters for the locale:
request.predicate = NSPredicate(format: "locale = %#", "en")
Obviously, you can sort by string with the usual sort descriptors. Now, to populate your table, you get to the item by following the relationshp in the other direction.
let title = fetchedResultsController.objectAtIndexPath(indexPath)!
let item = title.item

I ended up doing a fetch request for my LocalizableString entity instead. With a predicate that checks the locale and the inverse relationship:
NSPredicate(format: "locale == %# AND itemName != nil", locale)

Related

Filtering Realm with nested subqueries

My app has data that looks like this.
class ShelfCollection: Object {
let shelves: List<Shelf>
}
class Shelf: Object {
let items: List<Item>
}
class Item: Object {
var name: String
let infos: List<String>
}
I'm trying to get all shelves in a shelf collection where any items match the query either by name or by an element in their infos list. From my understanding this predicate should be correct, but it crashes.
let wildQuery = "*" + query + "*"
shelfResults = shelfCollection.shelves.filter(
"SUBQUERY(items, $item, $item.name LIKE[c] %# OR SUBQUERY($item.infos, $info, info LIKE[c] %#).#count > 0).#count > 0",
wildQuery, wildQuery
)
It complies as a NSPredicate, but crashes when Realm is attempting to parse it, throwing me
'RLMException', reason: 'Object type '(null)' not managed by the Realm'
I suspect the nested subquery might be what fails, but I don't know enough about NSPredicate to be sure. Is this an acceptable query, and how can I make it.. work?
This is an answer and a solution but there's going to be a number of issues with the way the objects are structured which may cause other problems. It was difficult to create a matching dataset since many objects appear within other objects.
The issue:
Realm cannot currently filter on a List of primitives
EDIT: Release 10.7 added support for filters/queries as well as aggregate functions on primitives so the below info is no longer completely valid. However, it's still something to be aware of.
so this Item property will not work for filtering:
let infos: List<String>
However, you can create another object that has a String property and filter on that object
class InfoClass: Object {
#objc dynamic var info_name = ""
}
and then the Item class looks like this
class Item: Object {
var name: String
let infos = List<InfoClass>()
}
and then you filter based on the InfoClass object, not it's string property. So you would have some objects
let info0 = InfoClass()
info0.info_name = "Info 0 name"
let info1 = InfoClass()
info1.info_name = "Info 1 name"
let info2 = InfoClass()
info2.info_name = "Info 2 name"
which are stored in the Item->infos list. Then the question
I'm trying to get all shelves in a shelf collection...
states you want to filter for a collection, c0 in this case, shelves whose items contain a particular info in their list. Lets say we want to get those shelves whose items have info2 in their list
//first get the info2 object that we want to filter for
guard let info2 = realm.objects(InfoClass.self).filter("info_name == 'Info 2 name'").first else {
print("info2 not found")
return
}
print("info2 found, continuing")
//get the c0 collection that we want to get the shelves for
if let c0 = realm.objects(ShelfCollection.self).filter("collection_name == 'c0'").first {
let shelfResults = c0.shelves.filter("ANY items.infoList == %#", info2)
for shelf in shelfResults {
print(shelf.shelf_name)
}
} else {
print("c0 not found")
}
I omitted filtering for the name property since you know how to do that already.
The issue here is the infos could appear in many items, and those items could appear in many shelf lists. So because of the depth of data, with my test data, it was hard to have the filter return discreet data - it would probably make more sense (to me) if I had example data to work with.
Either way, the answer works for this use case, but I am thinking another structure may be better but I don't know the full use case so hard to suggest that.

Realm subquery with List count in Swift

I have
class Car : Object
{
let queries : List<QueryModel> = List<QueryModel>()
}
and
class QueryModel : Object
{
let location : String = ""
}
Now how do I write that NSPredicate to fetch just that cars which have queries with location equal to 'London'?
p.s. It's a known fact that things like #count do not work on Swift List class...
p.p.s. I need it as a predicate because this is the only way RBQFetchedResultsController knows how to do it's job.
How I thought it could've been written was something like NSPredicate(format: "SUBQUERY(queries, $query, $query.location == %#)", 'London'). But nothing like this ever passes Realm's predicate validation :)
You can write
NSPredicate(format: "ANY queries.location = %#", locationString)
If you want to add other filtering, you can create other NSPredicate and then use
NSCompoundPredicate(andPredicateWithSubpredicates: [pred1, pred2])
to combine the filters.
Now, if you want to filter cars, you have to prepare a
let request = FetchRequest<Car>(realm: realm, predicate: predicate)
then you can use RBQFetchedResultsController to execute the request.

I'm having trouble fetching entities from core data based on relationships with predicates

Quick background: I have en ExamEntity, which is linked via a relationship to sections covered in the exam (SectionEntity), which is linked via a relationship to the subsections under each section (SubsectionEntity).
What I'm try to do is fetch the sections and related subsections which will be covered be a selected Exam, and store them in a dictionary which can hold multiple string values per key.
My code starts like this:
var sectionsDictionary = [String:[String]]()
//---Fetch Section Entity
let sectionPredicate = NSPredicate(format: "(exam = %#)", selectedExam)
let sectionsFetchRequest:NSFetchRequest = SectionEntity.MR_requestAllWithPredicate(sectionPredicate)
let fetchedSections:NSArray = SectionEntity.MR_executeFetchRequest(sectionsFetchRequest)
All good here. But then I try and fetch the subsections related to the selected sections and things go wrong.
following Code:
for section in fetchedSections {
let sectionName = section.valueForKey("name") as! String
// //error occurs on the line below
let subsectionPredicate = NSPredicate(format: "(section = %#)", section as! SectionEntity)
let subsectionsFetchRequest:NSFetchRequest = SubsectionEntity.MR_requestAllWithPredicate(subsectionPredicate)
let fetchedSubsections:NSArray = SubsectionEntity.MR_executeFetchRequest(subsectionsFetchRequest)
The error I get is:
Could not cast value of type 'NSManagedObject_SectionEntity_' (0x7fb363e18580) to 'MyApp.SectionEntity' (0x10c9213e0).
The next few lines are supposed to iterate through the fetched results, adding their names as values to the dictionary with section names as keys.
for subsection in fetchedSubsections{
let subsectionName = subsection.valueForKey("name") as! String
sectionsDictionary[sectionName] = [subsectionName]
}
}
thanks in advance.
You're not defining the type of the class for your record
Go to the Project.xcdatamodeld file, and select your SectionEntity
Check if the field Class is like this
If it is then write in the Class field "SectionEntity" and press Enter, it should be like this
Then try again
You need to make sure that the elements of the collection you enumerate are of the correct type.
Presumably, Magical Record will return an NSArray of NSManagedObject items. You need to make sure Swift knows what type section is.
for object in fetchedSections {
let section = object as! SectionEntity
// ...
}
Also, see my answer about the unsuccessful casts to NSManagedObject subclasses.

Realm query to exclude results from relations

I have
class Person: Object {
let friends = List<Person>()
let family = List<Person>()
}
I have person instance, which includes links to some other persons in person.friends list.
And I want to query all other Person objects, not including person.friends and person.
I can make two for in loops to check if the query doesn't contain persons from the list, but it seems like not the best way to do that.
P.S. In CoreData I did it with predicate:
let predicate = NSPredicate(format: "SELF != %# AND NOT SELF IN %#",person, person.friends),
But Realm gives me an error:
Predicate expressions must compare a keypath and another keypath or a
constant value
.
Unfortunately, this predicate is currently unsupported in Realm -- you can follow https://github.com/realm/realm-cocoa/issues/1328 for updates.

Predicate for filtering by specific managed object - Swift

I have one to many relationship in my core data model ('Client'<-->>Assessment') and in my assessment tableview I am currently filtering assessments by client name.
func assessmentFetchRequest() -> NSFetchRequest {
let fetchRequest = NSFetchRequest(entityName: "Assessment")
let sortDescriptor = NSSortDescriptor(key: "nsDateOfAssessment", ascending: false)
fetchRequest.sortDescriptors = [sortDescriptor]
fetchRequest.predicate = NSPredicate(format: "client.name == %#", self.client.name)
return fetchRequest
}
I would like to know how, or if its possible, to filter by the specific managed object instead of an attribute of the managed object ('name' in this case). I've tried changing my predicate to this:
fetchRequest.predicate = NSPredicate(format: "client.objectID == %#", self.client.objectID)
but I just get a crash with an uncaught exception.
I'm wanting to change this because it seems bad practice to filter by name since two clients may have the same name and therefore the same filter results.
So I am going to guess that for you sort descriptor the key name of 'nsDateOfAssessment' is not the actual name of the core data attribute. The key should be the actual name of attribute. Also, I wouldn't say that filtering by first name is bad practice. Perhaps add an additional param to your predicate that can help pinpoint the correct items. Of course, if you are storing a unique identifier for each entity, it would be a cleaner way to go about it.

Resources