In today’s competitive and advanced mobile market, it is essential that iOS developers know how to develop apps that can manage and access data efficiently. This is one of the key advantages in knowing how to implement Core Data for your iOS App.
What is Core Data?
Core Data is a powerful and versatile Framework used to manage relational data. Core Data allows you to use Apple’s native Objective-C language to access your data within your app, whether you are reading, writing or searching. If your iOS app stores user generated data locally, caches data locally or supplies pre-loaded data to the user – it should be using Core Data.
This is a key skill that every iOS developer should learn.
What’s involved with Core Data?
Data Modelling:
Data modelling is the demonstration, via flowcharts or diagrams, of all possible relationships between data within an app. To illustrate these sometimes complex relationships, you will need to know how to create databases and entities, as well as how to configure attributes and relationships.
This can be a time-intensive process and certainly shouldn’t be rushed, as this is an incredibly important step to ensure you develop a functional and successful app!
Data Persistence:
This is the function that enables an app to save data, which we do learn about on our beginner iOS app dev course. However, there are far more advanced levels available to developers, for example, the creation of managed objects, which can then be used to save data.
Fetching Data:
Once the data is saved, the app will need to be able to access the data when requested. This function is implemented by creating a fetch request, then by sorting the data and finally creating predicates to fetch the data.
Predicates:
This is fantastic tool within Core Data! By understanding how to use and set predicates, you can create an app that will return results for a rich variety of complex queries!
iOS 7:
Once the previous steps have been mastered, you will need know how to link the Core Data with your iOS project! This is done by feeding all the app’s data into a variety of iOS objects, such as tables and pickers.
Background Processing:
To allow your app to perform other tasks not related to Core Data, like user interaction with the interface, you can set the app to access the Core Data in the background.
Pre-loading Data:
If you want your app to show certain data once it has been installed, you will need to pre-load the core data with some default data.
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