Breaking down a Core Data Entity - ios

If I have an entity Person, and it has information like name, dateOfBirth, email and then it also has information like houseNo, street, landmark, city, country as well.
and this entity is representing a big form on an iPad.
Is it possible to break it down into smaller entities like Address ?
and then relate Address to Person, but that will be a one to one relationship, is it Okay ?
I am asking this because too many attribues based on one form for a person is becoming complex to manage.

You are encouraged to use a more entities to reflect the logic of your data model. This is certainly a good design principle and will provide more flexibility for future developments of your project.
However, I do not agree with your argument about complexity. In fact, a relational core data model is more complex than a flat one. Having one form referring to just one entity with a whole lot of attributes is certainly less complex than having relationships to other entities.
So if you think that your original data model is sufficient for your purposes, there is no good reason to change it.

Related

Best Way to Store Contextual Attributes in Core Data?

I am using Core Data to store objects. What is the most efficient possibility for me (i.e. best execution efficiency, least code required, greatest simplicity and greatest compatibility with existing functions/libraries/frameworks) to store different attribute values for each object depending on the context, knowing that the contexts cannot be pre-defined, will be legion and constantly edited by the user?
Example:
An Object is a Person (Potentially =Employer / =Employee)
Each person works for several other persons and has different titles in relation to their work relationships, and their title may change from one year to another (in case this detail matters: each person may also concomitantly employ one or several other persons, which is why a person is an employee but potentially also an employer)
So one attribute of my object would be “Title vs Employer vs Year Ended”
The best I could do with my current knowledge is save all three elements together as a string which would be an attribute value assigned to each object, and constantly parse that string to be able to use it, but this has the following (HUGE) disadvantages:
(1) Unduly Slowed Execution & Increased Energy Use. Using this contextual attribute is at the very core of my prospective App´s core function (so it would literally be used 10-100 times every minute). Having to constantly parse this information to be able to use it adds undue processing that I’d very much like to avoid
(2) Undue Coding Overhead. Saving this contextual attribute as a string will unduly make additional coding for me necessary each time I’ll use this central information (i.e. very often).
(3) Undue Complexity & Potential Incompatibility. It will also add undue complexity and by departing from the expected practice it will escape the advantages of Core Data.
What would be the most efficient way to achieve my intended purpose without the aforementioned disadvantages?
Taking your example, one option is to create an Employment entity, with attributes for the title and yearEnded and two (to-one) relationships to Person. One relationship represents the employer and the other represents the employee.
The inverse relationships are in both cases to-many. One represents the employments where the Person is the employee (so you might name it employmentsTaken) and the other relationship represents the employments where the Person is the Employer (so you might name it employmentsGiven).
Generalising, this is the solution recommended by Apple for many-many relationships which have attributes (see "Modelling a relationship based on its semantics" in their documentation).
Whether that will address all of the concerns listed in your question, I leave to your experimentation: if things are changing 10-100 times a minute, the overhead of fetch requests and creating/updating/deleting the intermediate (Employment) entity might be worse than your string representation.

Best practice CoreData - separate entity for sequential primitives or embed within the referring entity?

I was wondering if a CoreData guru can offer some advice on the best way or organising the model for my current project...
I have a Patient entity for which I will be recording a number of parameters over time. It makes sense for Patient and Parameter to be entities as they have associated descriptive information but the actual measurements I'm not so sure about.
If I make a Measurement (which will be a tuple composed of a Date and a Double) an entity, it will need a relationship to a Parameter and all of the Parameters for all of the Patients will (I suspect) form one massive SQL-Lite table. If I embed the Measurement within the Parameter entity for a given patient (saving as a Transformable type) then I would keep things a bit more granular and I would expect the performance to be better.
Thoughts?
After doing some more research on this question, the consensus is that it is best to avoid placing collections (e.g. arrays) of data within an entity. Use of separate entities makes searching the data significantly easier and less code-heavy so I have decided to follow this approach.

Is this pattern suitable for Core Data?

The only databases I've worked with before are MySQL so the database design of CoreData is confusing me a little bit.
Briefly, the design consists of a many-to-many relationship between people and businesses. Many people can own one business. One person can own many businesses.
In this simplified design, there are 3 tables:
PERSON BUSINESS OWNED BUSINESS
------ -------- --------------
id id personID
name name businessID
email website acquisitionDate
The OwnedBusiness table is the one that's confusing me. In MySQL, this table is used to support many-to-many relationships. I understand that CoreData doesn't require this, however I have an extra field in OwnedBusiness: acquisitionDate.
Does the extra field, acquisitionDate warrant the use of the extra entity/table? If not, where would that field go?
First, Core Data is not a database, full stop.
Core Data is an object graph management framework, your model in your application.
It can persist to disk in a database. It can also persist as binary, XML and just about anything else. It does not even need to persist.
Think about Core Data as an object graph only. In your example you would have a Person entity, a Business entity and a OwnedBusiness entity.
The OwnedBusiness entity would have two relationships and one property. You would not manage the foreign keys because Core Data handles that if you end up persisting to a database. Otherwise they are object pointers.
So first of all, CoreData is not a relational db just to clear this out.
Second, I think you should have a quick look at CoreData documentation and since you are familiar with MySql it will be an easy reading and I think you will be kind of amazed by the extra features that CoreData provides.
Regarding the many-to-many relationship, CoreData support this relationship without the need of extra tables. Also the relationship are not based on ids, they are based directly on objects.
So in your case, you don't have to use the person id & business id to create the relationship, you can create the relationship in the Relationship section of your xcdatamodel, there you can set the relationship class (or Destination), an inverse to that relationship (useful thing) and of course the type of relationship (to-many, to-one).
So to answer your question, you can add it there depending on your business logic. As a short advice, pleas don't try to normalise the database as you would do on a normal MySql instance, you will loose lot of performance by normalising, this thing is often ignored by devs.

One-to-many relationship between same entity in Core Data

I have entity called Item. It has attribute title and I want it to have collection of subitems (type of Item).
One item can have many (sub)items. (sub)item is part of right one item. For example, there is item titled as car. It has subitems titled wheels, engine and cabine. Cabine has subitems seat and steering wheel.
How to model it? Should I set inverse to subitems? If I set no inverse, I'm getting warning. And whether it is inverse or not, it is still many-to-many. No way to set it one-to-many.
How should I think of this problem? I don't have much experience with databases and I think there is also difference between modeling in Core Data and in SQL.
EDIT: There should be subitems instead of subitem in the picture
I've added relationship superitem as inverse to subitems. superitem is to-one type with nullify delete rule and subitems is to-many type with cascade delete rule. Seems to be the most perfect solution for my case. As bonus I don't have to write my own - addSubitem: method (as it is not generated for Swift) because it is automatically added if I set item's superitem.
Object modeling and relational database design are quite different, at least on the surface. The concepts of encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism have no exact analog in the relational data model. You are going to have to think about the problem in two different ways in order to do both object modeling and relational database design.
There is a model that is sort of half way between them. It's called the "Entity Relationship model", and this has been around almost as long as the relational model. This is useful for thinking about the problem and analyzing the data requirements at a conceptual level. ER modeling is very parallel to object modeling, except that object modeling models behavior as well as data, and ER modeling only models data.
The problem with learning ER modeling for this purpose is that in the present state of affairs, most of the professionals who use ER diagrams do not use them to depict a conceptual model. They use them to depict a relational design for a database. So if you learn ER modeling from them, you'll learn a design methodology, and not an analysis methodology.
Data analysis and database design are really very different activities, and it's useful to keep them separate in your mind, even if a single project requires you to do both of them. Oddly enough, the same division ultimately comes up in object modeling as well. Some object models are analysis models, and try to clarify the problem space. Other object models are design models, and try to clarify the solution space.
Acknowledging what Mitty said. You need wrap your brain around objects (not relational tables). Considering your example I would break it down as follows. The top level object is an item such as a car, truck, airplane, boat, etc. Items can have systems such as engines, transmissions, cabins. Systems can have components such as pistons, spark plugs, seats, steering wheels, tires. If you think of all these things as objects, then perhaps the beginning of a model would look like this:
An item may have many systems. Systems may have many components. Apple recommends setting the inverse, but you should worry more about the relationships and their cardinality (i.e. one-to-one, one-to-many). You can use a reflexive relationship (to self) as you depicted, but I think that limits your ability to really leverage the power of the object model as all 'things' would be represented as 'item' and you wouldn't have the nice distinction of system and component (IMO)

Domain Driven Design, SOC, and entity identification

I've been trying to wrap my mind around DDD and how it can relate to MVC, but I'm having trouble with regards to entity identification.
In particular, I'm trying to maintain strict separation between my presentation, domain, and data models. My hangup here is in how I preserve entity identification across these boundaries. To clarify, I'm using separate classes to represent the same entity in different contexts - for example, I have a 'ShipmentRequest' domain class, several 'ShipmentRequestView' presentation classes (depending on the properties required by a particular view), and a 'shipment_request' database table (my data model).
I feel like using an 'ID' property (like ShipmentRequestId) would be a violation of the separation I'm trying to achieve, since this ID property is a database concern, and not a domain concern; and I don't want to pass the same object between layers, as this would mean passing unneeded data into my presentation layer.
How do I preserve this separation, and yet track identity between these layers?
Without the Id field in your entity you cannot map it to a database row. Therefore this id field even though it has nothing to do with your entities must leak into your domain model.
I feel it is most often overkill to use a presentation model, especially if what your are trying to achieve is hide some properties.
I think separation of concerns is mostly driven by the bounded context. For example, your Person, PersonView and Person table all seem the relate to a transaction processing context. In such a context I would make not even have a PersonView and the person table would be abstracted away.
On the other hand if you are in a reporting context, a PersonView would be more useful.
I think that the context is much more important than any layering scheme.
As for the lack of a natural key in your person entity, it could mean that Person is not really an entity. For exemple, in any real life application, there is always a number associated with the person: an employee has a employee number, a client as an account number, etc. This business id is definitely part of the domain.
I think having an "ID" field on entities is a concession a lot (most?) people end up making, and I wouldn't feel guilty for doing so.
As you say, even when you're not dealing with the database, you still need some notion of identity. You can try to come up with some kind of "natural" identity for each entity (a field like name, or a combination of several fields), but this isn't always possible. Even when it is, having an ID field often acts as a handy shortform for saying "the entity whose name is X, and whose date of birth is Y, and whose SSN is Z".
In the end, while arguably less "pure", having an ID field will likely simplify things a great deal.
Shipment Request is definitely a better example!
How will the users find a shipment request?
Depending on the answer you might need an id that users might remember, for example 20091012-A.
Can a shipment request id ever change?
If no, use the db key for identity.
Will you need to transfer shipment requests from one system to another?
If yes, do not use the db key for identity.
Whatever key you use you will need to make it available in the presentation model so that you can build links to actions on a particular shipment request.

Resources