Mapping relationships with AFIncrementalStore - ios

I'm in the process of integrating AFIncrementalStore into my project but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to make relationships work.
Let's say I have two models: Document and Page. A document has many pages (one-many). Each model has an inverse relationship to the other.
So I can do:
myDocument.pages
or
myPage.document
I'm trying to fetch all the pages that belong to a document. I have an AFIncrementalStore subclass and an AFHTTPClient subclass that implement the necessary methods.
I can see that the right REST URI is called (eg. /documents/:id/pages). I can also see that the pages get downloaded and stored into the pages table in the sql database.
The problem is the relationship between the two isn't made. When I look at the DB the foreign key column is empty.
Also if I do myDocument.pages it doesn't return anything.
Do I have to manually link these two when new data is fetched? I'm reading through the AFIncrementalStore source but nothing is sticking out.
Thoughts?

Alright, after a few hours or debugging and reading through AFIS line by line I got it to work, but it required some changes to the REST API.
Initially I had my API return something like the following (example):
GET /documents/12/pages
Response:
{
title: "My Title",
body: "Some body text ..."
}
But in order to make it work nicely with AFIS I had to add a reference to the Document in there, like so:
Response:
{
title: "My Title",
body: "Some body text ...",
document:
{
id: "12"
}
}
As long as in CoreData the relationship is properly setup, AFIS will loop through relationships and automatically find the relationship "document" and look for that key in the returned object. If your server key doesn't match your core data property then you can override one of the AFIncrementalStoreHTTPClient protocol methods to specify the right object.
This is working fine for now, I'll report back if something goes wrong.
Hope that helps someone else out.

Related

Looping through list of objects created by createEntry() and editing their properties before doing submitChange()

Good afternoon fellow developers,
I have come across a scenario where I found myself needing to retrieve the list of pending changes from my model and editing a specific property of those entries before sending them to my back-end.
These are new entities I created using the createEntry() method of the OData model v2. But, at the time of creation of said entities, I do not possess the value I need to add to them yet. This is the list of entities I retrieve by using the getPendingChanges() method on my model:
What I need to do is to loop through each of these newly created entities and set a specific property into them before actually sending them to my back-end with the submitChanges() method. Bare in mind that these are entry objects created by the createEntry() method and exist only in my front-end until I am able to submit them with success.
Any ideas that might point me in the right direction? I look forward to reading from you!
I was able to solve this issue in the following way:
var oPendingChanges = this.model.getPendingChanges();
var aPathsPendingChanges = $.map(oPendingChanges, function(value, index) { return [index];});
aPathsPendingChanges.forEach(sPath => oModel.setProperty("/" + sPath + "/PropertyX","valueFGO"));
The first two instructions retrieve the entire list of pendingChanges objects and then builds an array of paths to each individual entry. I then use that array of paths to loop through my list of pending changes and edit into the property I want in each iteration of the loop. Special thanks to the folks at answers.sap for the guidance!

Avoid calculating startIndex and endIndex when creating a document using Google Docs API

I have proven to myself that I can insert text into a Google Docs document using this code:
function appendToDocument() {
let offset = 12;
let updateObject = {
documentId: 'xxxxxxx',
resource: {
requests: [{
"insertText": {
"text": "John Doe",
"location": {
"index": offset,
},
},
}],
},
};
gapi.client.docs.documents.batchUpdate(updateObject).then(function(response) {
appendPre('response = ' + JSON.stringify(response));
}, function(response) {
appendPre('Error: ' + response.result.error.message);
});
}
My next step is to create an entire, complex document using the api. I am stunned by what appears to be the fact that I need to maintain locations into the documents, like this
new Location().setIndex(25)
I am informing myself of that opinion by reading this https://developers.google.com/docs/api/how-tos/move-text
The document I am trying to create is very dynamic and very complex, and handing the coding challenge to keeping track of index values to the api user, rather than the api designer, seems odd.
Is there an approach, or a higher level api, that allows me construct a document without this kind of house keeping?
Unfortunately, the short answer is no, there's no API that lets you bypass the index-tracking required of the base Google Docs API - at least when it comes to building tables.
I recently had to tackle this issue myself - a combination of template updating and document construction - and I basically ended up writing an intermediate API with helper functions to search for and insert by character indices.
For example, one trick I've been using for table creation is to first create a table of a specified size at a given index, and put some text in the first cell. Then I can search the document object for the tableCells element that contains that text, and work back from there to get the table start index.
Another trick is that if you know how many specific kinds of objects (like tables) you have in your document, you can parse through the full document object and keep track of table counts, and stop when you get to the one you want to update/delete (you can use this approach for creating too but the target text approach is easier, I find).
From there with some JSON parsing and trial-and-error, you can figure out the start index of each cell in a table, and write functions to programmatically find and create/replace/delete. If there's an easier way to do all this, I haven't found it. There is one Github repo with a Google Docs API wrapper specifically for tables, and it does appear to be active, although I found it after I wrote everything on my own and I haven't used it.)
Here's a bit of code to get you started:
def get_target_table(doc, target_txt):
""" Given a target string to be matched in the upper left column of a table
of a Google Docs JSON object, return JSON representing that table. """
body = doc["body"]["content"]
for element in body:
el_type = list(element.keys())[-1]
if el_type == "table":
header_txt = get_header_cell_text(element['table']).lower().strip()
if target_txt.lower() in header_txt:
return element
return None
def get_header_cell_text(table):
""" Given a table element in Google Docs API JSON, find the text of
the first cell in the first row, which should be a column header. """
return table['tableRows'][0]\
['tableCells'][0]\
['content'][0]\
['paragraph']['elements'][0]\
['textRun']['content']
Assuming you've already created a table with the target text in it: now, start by pulling the document JSON object from the API, and then use get_target_table() to find the chunk of JSON related to the table.
doc = build("docs", "v1", credentials=creds).documents().get(documentId=doc_id).execute()
table = get_target_table(doc, "my target")
From there you'll see the nested tableRows and tableCells objects, and the content inside each cell has a startIndex. Construct a matrix of table cell start indices, and then, for populating them, work backwards from the bottom right cell to the upper left, to avoid displacing your stored indices (as suggested in the docs and in one of the comments).
It's definitely a bit of a slog. And styling table cells is a whole 'nother beast, which is a dizzying maze of JSON options. The interactive JSON constructor tool on the Docs API site is useful to get the syntax write.
Hope this helps, good luck!
The answer I arrived at: You can create Docs without using their JSON schema.
https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/manage-uploads#node.js_1
So, create the document in your format of choice (HTML, DocX, MD (you'd use pandoc to convert MD to another format)), and then upload that.

Having trouble understanding when to use int or string in Coredata

iOS 10, Swift3
I am making an application where user fetches their daily agenda from server, and I wanna save their schedule in Coredata. A simple json from API comes like
{
"id": 11639002,
"subject": "Coffeee",
"startUTC": "2017-05-03T15:00:00+00:00",
"endUTC": "2017-05-03T16:00:00+00:00"
}
If a change is made on server side I wanna update the appointment also I dont wanna save duplicate entries. Also I wanna be able to sort this row by startDate I wanna pass around this appointment row by its id
I thought a good solution for this would be like this
#NSManaged public var id: Int32
#NSManaged public var subject: String?
#NSManaged public var startUTC: NSDate?
#NSManaged public var endUTC: NSDate?
Every single post I read here says that Coredata is not ORM or relational database , so developer should get away from that mind state.
I dont understand how and why would I need to get away from relational database mindset when I am trying to replicate unique_id approach like in server side.
This tutorial http://dorianroy.com/blog/2015/09/how-to-implement-unique-constraints-in-core-data-with-ios-9/
says that
No more fetch/if/else
Until now, when you wanted to import data objects into Core Data from
a file or network request, you had to create a fetch request for each
incoming object with a predicate that matches the id and then execute
it to look for an existing version of that object. If you found one,
you would update it, otherwise create a new object. With Unique
Constraints, you don’t have to do this fetch/if/else anymore and save
lots of DB requests while parsing the data.
and Unique Constraints must be strings
So all I want to do is to not have duplicate rows and update the row by it's id.
What approach should I use? Do I have to make ids string like in that blog post or old regular 32 bit integer approach would work too?
The bottom line is you should write code you understand and in a way that others seeing it for the first time can understand.
It's true that core data isn't a relational database, and yet it's a wrapper around one. So if it you can solve your problems using that paradigm, it is simple and understandable, I say go for it. Be prepared to revisit your implementation somewhere down the road. But you'll understand your issues better by then.

RestKit - use identificationAttributes that are not part of the response

In RestKit is it possible to use identificationAttributes that are actually not part of the JSON response?
My case is the following - I have a service that lists all articles for the currently logged-in user like http://example.com/json/articles.json
My problem is the following - since the application allows multiple users to login, I keep the articles in the database together with the userId for each article. If I set the articleMapping.identificationattributes = #["articleId"], then I have a problem if two users using the device have the same article - it will be overwritten regardless of the userId, because it is not part of the response.
To sum up the facts:
For the JSON request I do not send the userId, it is part of the
server session only, so I think that I cannot use RKRoute
I do the mapping of the article with the user manually after RestKit mapping.
I do not have the userId property as part of the JSON response, it exists only inside the ArticleManagedObject.
Is there a way to inform RestKit that during the mapping, it should check the articleId+userId combination as an identificator? I tried using identificationPredicate with no success.
EDIT:
An example response from the server, when UserA is logged in:
{
"data":{
"articles":[
{
"articleId":1,
"title":"Objective C Basics"
},
{
"articleId":2,
"title":"Xcode Basics"
}
]
}
}
and here is the response when UserB is logged in:
{
"data":{
"articles":[
{
"articleId":1,
"title":"Objective C Basics"
},
{
"articleId":3,
"title":"Java Basics"
}
]
}
}
If UserA logs in, everything is fine. But if UserB logs in from the same device, then article 1 is mapped to UserB, and from now on, the connection between UserA and article 1 is lost.
As I understand from your suggestion, the only solution is to return also the user id from the service, set RKUnionAssignmentPolicy and let RestKit take care of the mapping (currently I am manually making the mapping between articles and users after RestKit).
Another question that I have - is it possible to set the identificationAttributes or identificationPredicate so that it makes a separation between object article 1 for UserA and object article 1 for UserB.
You currently do the user to article mapping outside RestKit, this is fine, but you will need to modify this process a little.
To begin with, I'm assuming here that the article response is the full set of articles for the user. If not then things get more tricky and you'll need to modify the below to account:
Start by getting all of the existing articles for a user. With this we're going to look at what needs to be removed and what needs to be added.
As we iterate through the articles we have received we can check the existing articles for a match, if we find one we have no work to do. If we don't find a match we need to add the relationship to the existing set, which will be a union with any relationship to any other user.
Next we want to remove the list of new articles from the list of the existing articles to get the list of deletions, for these we just need to break the link, again leaving other users unchanged.

Querying TAFFYDB nested records

I have created a data model using TAFFYDB. Some of the fields have nested records. I am facing difficulties querying and updating the nested records.
For example:
var friends = TAFFY([
{
"id":1,
"gender":"M",
"first":"John",
"last":"Smith",
"city":"Seattle, WA",
"comp":
[
{
"id":1,
"audience":"cavern"
},
{
"id":2,
"audience":"cottage"
}
]
},
{
"id":2,
"gender":"F",
"first":"Basic",
"last":"Smith",
"city":"Seattle, WA",
"comp":
[
{
"id":1,
"audience":"bush"
},
{
"id":2,
"audience":"swamp"
}
]
}
]);
Supposing I need to update any of the comp field's audience, how will I go about it?
With regards to queries:
When you have simpler nested arrays, you should be able to select specific records using the has and hasAll methods. However, there is an open issue that states neither of these methods work correctly. There are commits but since the issue has been left open, I assume they are not 100% fixed.
For for complex nested data, like your example, the only thing I found was this old mailing list conversation talking about some sort of find method. No such method seems to exist though nor is there any mention of it in the docs.
With regards to updates:
You should be able to update the "comp" data by passing in the modified JSON that goes with it (assuming you are able to get the data out of the db in the first place) into a normal update. However, there is an open bug showing that update does not work when record values are objects. So even if you were able to query the data and were able to modify it, you wouldn't be able to update a record anyway because of the bug. You can however do a remove and an insert.
Despite what I found above, I did some testing and found that you can update files by passing in objects. So this is a quick example of how to do a simple update:
// To show what TAFFYDB looks like:
console.log(friends().stringify());
"[{"id":1,"gender":"M","first":"John","last":"Smith","city":"Seattle, WA","comp":[{"id":1,"audience":"cavern"},{"id":2,"audience":"cottage"}],"___id":"T000003R000002","___s":true},{"id":2,"gender":"F","first":"Basic","last":"Smith","city":"Seattle, WA","comp":[{"id":1,"audience":"bush"},{"id":2,"audience":"swamp"}],"___id":"T000003R000003","___s":true}]"
// Get a copy of the comp file from the database for what you want to modify.
// In this example, let's get the **first** record matching people with the name "John Smith":
var johnsComp = friends({first:"John",last:"Smith"}).first().comp;
// Remember, if you want to use select("comp") instead, this will return an array of results.
// So to get the first result, you would need to do this despite there being only one matching result:
// friends({first:"John",last:"Smith"}).select("comp")[0];
// There are no nested queries in TAFFYDB so you need to work with the resulting object as if it were normal javascript.
// You should know the structure and you can either modify things directly, iterate through it, or whatever.
// In this example, I'm just going to change one of the audience values directly:
johnsComp[0].audience = "plains";
// Now let's update that record with the newly modified object.
// Note - if there are more than one "John Smith"s, then all of them will be updated.
friends({first:"John",last:"Smith"}).update({comp:johnsComp});
// To show what TAFFYDB looks like after updating:
console.log(friends().stringify());
"[{"id":1,"gender":"M","first":"John","last":"Smith","city":"Seattle, WA","comp":[{"id":1,"audience":"plains"},{"id":2,"audience":"cottage"}],"___id":"T000003R000002","___s":true},{"id":2,"gender":"F","first":"Basic","last":"Smith","city":"Seattle, WA","comp":[{"id":1,"audience":"bush"},{"id":2,"audience":"swamp"}],"___id":"T000003R000003","___s":true}]"
For a better targeted query or update (something that perhaps acts like a nested query/update), you can possibly try passing in a function. If you look at the docs, there is a simple example of this for update():
db().update(function () {this.column = "value";return this;}); // sets column to "value" for all matching records
I have an example, in this case i made an update to a nested field.
To acces the data you can do like this:
console.log( JSON.stringify(
data({'id':'489'}).get()[0].review[0][0].comments
))
This is an example how it works

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