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I want to create a searchable database in Xcode - for example, of different trees. The database would consist of the tree name, two images, price, and a short description. What is the best and most efficient way of creating such a database?
I am aware of: Core Data, SQLite3, and Parse. I am leaning towards SQLite3 but have not found a good place to learn how to implement this. Any suggestions?
Seeing as you are new to Objective-C and I doubt this will evolve into something need direct SQL I would suggest using CoreData. Although it is not technically a data base it is an object graph, it is built for exactly what you are wanting to do. Apple was even nice enough to build wrappers for everything you want to do.
CoreData to store your tree name, two images, price, and a short description.
NSFetchedResultsController for grabbing it.
UISearchBarController for letting the user search.
You would want to use Parse if you wanted to save your data to a server. If your doing everything locally I wouldn't worry about Parse. CoreData is what you want.
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I am brand new to ios development and am looking for some advice on the best way to structure my user data and access it throughout my app.
Data is retrieved via HTTPS requests that query a database for the desired information. There are separate calls for the different tables containing information of interest. The returned data is formatted as nested dictionaries where the outermost key is the column and the subsequent dictionary is key-value pairs of the index and the table value. Example:
{"column1":{"0":"value1-1", "1":"value1-2", "2":"value1-3"},"column2":{"0":"value2-1", "1":"value2-2", "2":"value2-3"}...}
My primary requirement is that I will need to be able to filter this data by the innermost values (some will be dates, some will be numbers, etc). I would like to have the data in a format that will make this simple to do and will not cause delays as there is no limit on the number of possible rows.
I have looked into reconstructing a user-specific SQLite database with the information and querying that throughout the app as necessary. I have also explored dataframes as this app was originally developed in python - don't ask - and relied on pandas dataframes.
I know this decision will impact me heavily and am trying to do my best to make an informed decision. I appreciate any feedback and am happy to give more useful context that might be missing.
TIA
You can use SQLite database for persistent storage. This is ideal for your main requirement of filtering the data. You should also create a structure or a class modelled on your data to store and use during runtime. You can refer this for deciding between a class or structure.
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For testing, I needed to generate a list of data values randomly and put them into the models for further use. But I found out that there is no library, which could produce such functionality.
The elegant solution I expected to find had to combine such simple things as:
the variety of data;
the variety of methods to reach this data;
the possibility to change the default data set to the custom one.
Since I hadn't found the accurate solution, I decided to create my own library (ref. https://github.com/codeitua/ios-data-factory).
There were implemented all necessary methods for data generation (including random names, cities, addresses, dates etc) and data retrieve. And moreover, it has "swifty" interface, which provides comfortable use in every project.
I hope, it will be helpful for everyone, who faced the same problem as me!
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I'm developing an iOS app that is going to parse XML from an RSS feed of events and display the details of each event on a table view. Each event has a title, a description (optional), a date and a time. I am able to parse the XML data using NSXMLParser; however, I am not sure how I should store the data and make it so that it persists after the app is closed.
I have read that I can use NSCoder to persist the data but I am not sure if this is the best route forward.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions as to what I could do?
Any help is appreciated.
You have several options for persisting data.
NSUserDefaults are meant for user settings - small amounts of data. They seem unsuitable for what you have in mind.
NSCoding is quite a good way to store structured data without the overhead of a database, yet it is slow in comparison to core data.
Core Data is Apples ORM, which is quite powerfull but not as easy to wrap your head around.
I answered a similar question recently, which goes into more detail regarding NSCoding with a complete example and some links for further reading.
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I am writing a trivia app in which there will be hundreds of sets of questions.
The app will come pre loaded with some quizzes however they would then need to download further quizzes which once downloaded will be stored within the app so that users can play them offline.
In this specific instance would I be better using core data or SQLite.
Thanks in advance.
The thing you have to realise here is that CoreData is not a DataBase.
It is an object persistence layer in your app. It happens to be backed by a SQLite DB by default but that's largely irrelevant.
I have written apps with a CoreData store that contains in the region of 100,000 entities and millions of relationships between them.
The argument that CoreData cannot handle complex data is not correct.
The trick is to design your Object Model exactly like you would define you object model in code.
You don't need foreign keys or join tables (these are all handled for you by Core Data).
If you have (for instance) a many-to-many relationship between Class and Student then just create a relationship between them and define it as a Many relationship on each end. Core Data will handle the data for you by creating the join tables and stuff like that. You don't need to worry about that.
For preloading the data you can also do this. It takes a bit of work but you can bundle a preloaded DB generated by CoreData and unwrap it at initial launch.
Which to use comes largely down to opinion (and so isn't a very good question for StackOverflow). There are some excellent tutorials on Core Data on the Ray Wenderlich site.
Worth reading through if you've never used CoreData before.
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The question is very simple.
Should I use Core Data only to persist data, to store it locally on a device or should I use it ALWAYS just to manage my application's model even if I do not persist significant amount of data?
What do you think?
Core Data provides an infrastructure for change management and for saving objects to and retrieving them from storage. It is not, though, in and of itself a database. You can use an in-memory store in your application.
Use it Always ? : NO. Use it when you think that your require the features that the Core Data framework offers to you, like any other framework.
Short answer is no. As others said if you do not need persistent store just create runtime objects and manage them.
Even when you need persistent database, Core Data is not always the best solution. For example if you have multi-platform app, or if you plan to port your application in future I'll definitely consider use base sqlite3 with requests. This way I can use same database structure in my Android, iOS and BB application, and even my sql statements will be written only once(with their interface) and then I'll just need some platform specific implementation above them.