I am running into an issue with CoreData (using MagicalRecord) trying to change an attribute. I think this is the result of the object having relationships to two parent entities.
The object is a manual, this has a to-many relationship to both a car and library. The library contains all manual objects. A car has 1-3 manual items.
Every manual has a UID and the same object is shared between the car and library.
For some reason, once the object is set into the relationship for both, I cannot change the title (NSString) attribute of the manual.
I checked to make sure I am in the same context. Not sure what the issue is.
This is what I am logging:
NSLog(#"Manual Title: %#",manual.title);
//prints Old Manual
manual.title = #"New Manual"
NSLog(#"Manual Title: %#",manual.title);
//prints New Manual
I'm saving this inside a MagicalRecord saveUsingCurrentThreadContextWithBlockAndWait other unrelated NSManagedObjects in the same method are being saved.
When the app loads the data into the UI, it still reads "Old Manual"
Any suggestions?
Thank you for your time.
It turns out the issue was two-fold with the MagicalRecord methods I was using:
1) Instead of saveUsingCurrentThreadContextWithBlockAndWait I should have used saveWithBlockAndWait
2) When I was fetching the manual object, I wasn't passing the context, so I changed MR_findFirstWithPredicate to MR_findFirstWithPredicate:inContext
Hopefully this will save someone else some time
Related
This is a follow up to an earlier question: Core Data: change delete rule programmatically.
I'd like to rephrase my question, and will do that here.
Briefly, my app allows updating entries from a 3rd party database, but I'd like to keep user annotations. So my workflow is:
iterate over all entities
download external xml and parse it into a new entity
if user annotations, change their relationship from old entity to new entity
delete old entity
During the import, the old entity is in the main context, the new entity is in a temporary import context.
Number 3 gives me problems, if I just change the relationship, then they don't show if I update my UI. If I use the objectID to get the annotation and then change the relationship as follows:
NSManagedObjectID *objectId = oldAnnotation.objectID;
Annotation *newAnnotation = [importContext objectWithID: objectId];
[newEntry addAnnotationObject: newAnnotation];
It's still not working - it's not showing up.
EDIT: if I change the context in the second line to newEntry.managedObjectContext, I get an Illegal attempt to establish a relationship 'foo' between objects in different contexts error.
What am I missing?
UPDATE: After some late-night hair-pulling debugging, I found that I when I was fetching the newEntry, I was actually fetching the oldEntry, therefore none of the changes would show up. The answer below by #Mundi pointed me in the right direction.
Copying the old annotations worked using my code above, followed by copying the attributes. For some user input with relationships in itself, I had to do a "Deep Copy", which I found here: How can I duplicate, or copy a Core Data Managed Object?.
I think creating a new entity and deleting the old one is a problematic strategy. You should try to properly update the existing entities and only create new ones if they do not yet exist.
Whenever I need an object from a different context, I fetch it. That being said, your object id code should work. However, there could be all sorts of other glitches, that you should check:
Did you save the importContext?
Did you save its parent context, presumably the main context?
Was the modified object graph saved to the persistent store?
Are you checking the results after you have saved?
I'm sorry the title may mislead you, since I'm not so good at English. Let me describe my problem as below (You may skip to the TL;DR version at the bottom of this question).
In Coredata, I design a Product entity. In app, I download products from a server. It return JSON string, I defragment it then save to CoreData.
After sometimes has passed, I search a product from that server again, having some interaction with server. Now, I call the online product XProduct. This product may not exist in CoreData, and I also don't want to save it to CoreData since it may not belong to this system (it come from other warehouse, not my current warehouse).
Assume this XProduct has the same properties as Product, but not belong to CoreData, the developer from before has designed another Object, the XProduct, and copy everything (the code) from Product. Wow. The another difference between these two is, XProduct has some method to interact with server, like: - (void)updateStock:(NSInteger)qty;
Now, I want to upgrade the Product properties, I'll have to update the XProduct also. And I have to use these two separately, like:
id product = anArrayContainsProducts[indexPath.row];
if ([product isKindOfClass:[XProduct class]] {
// Some stuff with the xproduct
}
else {
// Probably the same display to the cell.
}
TL;DR
Basically, I want to create a scenario like this:
Get data from server.
Check existed in CoreData.
2 == true => add to array (also may update some data from server).
2 == false => create object (contains same structure as NSManagedObject from JSON dictionary => add to array.
The object created in step 4 will never exist in CoreData.
Questions
How can I create an NSManagedObject without having it add to NSMangedObjectContext and make sure the app would run fine?
If 1 is not encouragement, please suggest me a better approach to this. I really don't like to duplicate so many codes like that.
Update
I was thinking about inheritance (XProduct : Product) but it still make XProduct the subclass of NSManagedObject, so I don't think that is a good approach.
There are a couple of possibilities that might work.
One is just to create the managed objects but not insert them into a context. When you create a managed object, the context argument is allowed to be nil. For example, calling insertNewObjectForEntityForName(_:inManagedObjectContext:) with no context. That gives you an instance of the managed object that's not going to be saved. They have the same lifetime as any other object.
Another is to use a second Core Data stack for these objects, with an in-memory persistent store. If you use NSInMemoryStoreType when adding the persistent store (instead of NSSQLiteStoreType), you get a complete, working Core Data stack. Except that when you save changes, they only get saved in memory. It's not really persistent, since it disappears when the app exits, but aside from that it's exactly the same as any other Core Data stack.
I'd probably use the second approach, especially if these objects have any relationships, but either should work.
Let's have this example:
We work with a set of animals. Let's assume that we don't need all animals persisted in the database, and there is a logic that controls adding and removing animals from database.
For example I have an object, a Horse, with string property name with "Suey", and I add her to Realm, with addObject:.
So now we have this object saved to Realm. This object is valid, and we can do horse.name, which will return "Suey".
What happens next is that I need to remove Suey from DB. I do deleteObject:. But sadly, it removes not only the persisted info about the horse, but also made my object invalid. Suey is basically dead, so if I want her back in the DB I need to create another horse from ground up, and only after that I will be able to have another Suey in the DB.
Is there another way of keeping Suey alive, so I have more flexibility on managing her state?
I hope I made the point clear, please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE
The Horse IS engaged in one-to-many relationship, so it's life span also impacts properties in related models.
Objects in Realm are accessors for the equivalent object int the database. If for whatever reason, you need to "detach" the object variable from its on-disk representation, you can copy it into memory. An easy way to do that is to create a new, un-persisted object with the contents of the persisted one:
// Assuming `Horse` inherits from `RLMObject` and `persistedHorse` is attached to an `RLMRealm`.
Horse *persistedHorse = ...;
Horse *inMemoryHorseCopy = [[Horse alloc] initWithObject:persistedHorse];
// This will create a new `Horse` object, not tied to an RLMRealm,
// by copying the contents of `persistedHorse`.
You can use the same approach whenever you need to copy an existing RLMObject either into a stand-alone object (as above), or into another realm.
According to the documentation every modification of your query result object (in your case Object Horse with Name Suey) modifies the data on disk directly because the result is the actual data and not a copy of it. So if you remove the horse you have to create a new one.
In the documentation and in the broad literature the generated factory method to delete/remove a subclassed managed object in CoreData for IOS is
(void)removeXXXObject:(NSManagedObject *)value
where XXX is the corresponding relationship or we can use simply removeObject.
In my code I used this:
Data *lastData = [[self sortedPersonDatas] objectAtIndex:0];
[selectedPerson removePersonDatasObject:lastData];
where PersonDatas is a one-to-many relationship to Data managed object from I took the last data (lastData resulted from a sorted array of all data)
But using the first two remove methods and checking the SQL database behind we can find that the actual data is existing just the inverse relationship is null.
To completely delete the data (all attributes and the object) I had to use:
[selectedPerson.managedObjectContext deleteObject:lastData];
The question: which is the better method and is it correct that CoreData leaves the data intact?
removeXXXObject only removes an object from a to-many relationship, but does not delete the object from the store. To do so, you have to indeed use deleteObject - this is the desired behavior. Calling deleteObject will by default also set the corresponding relationships to nil (see https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreData/Articles/cdRelationships.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001857-SW1).
I've got a huge xml File which needs to be parsed.
For different Tags inside the xml, e.g Football Soccer Data, I create NSManagedObjects e.g. SoccerPlayer and so forth.
I also need to use these objects a few times within the parsing method and so I created an Object which finds me the right object for the id I provide.
This works fine for the first game inside the xml but won't work for any one after that.
Could be the problem that I have to delete a few objects as I parse through the xml?
For my XML Parsing Framework, I use TouchXML.
Has anyone else experienced this behaviour before?
I agree with the comment that some code would help -- it's hard to understand exactly what the problem is. Nevertheless, I'll point out that the documentation for NSManagedObject's -objectID says:
Important: If the receiver has not yet been saved, the object ID is a
temporary value that will change when
the object is saved.
So, if you're creating an object, storing it's objectID, saving the context, and then trying to find the object with the objectID that you stored, you're probably going to fail because the temporary objectID was replaced with a permanent one when the context was saved.