Re: CoreData Best Practices

FROM : Scott Stevenson
DATE : Fri Apr 29 19:07:25 2005

On Apr 29, 2005, at 7:49 AM, James Clause wrote:

> I'd like some advice on the best way to use CoreData in various
> situations.  I'm trying to create a BibTeX manager.  The problem I'm
> facing is that BibTeX allows user defined fields and multiple authors.
>  The obvious way to handle this is to store multiple authors as an
> NSArray of NSStrings and the user defined fields in an NSDictionary.


Use a to-many relationship for the authors. These are represented at
code level as NSMutableSets, since Core Data relationships have no
inherent order.

The best implementation I've found for user-defined fields is a
collection of CustomUserValue objects which have a relationship to
their parent object. You can try all day and night to use a dictionary
for this, but you'll only make things hard on yourself. In particular,
you'll limit your ability to do some fancy seaching stuff.

The CustomUserValue should look something like:

   customValue - string
   internalKey - string
   displayKey - string


    - Scott

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