Core Data for preloaded information

Question

im learning about core data at the moment, I can see its benefits for apps like a phonebook etc, however is core data good if your app is to contain preloaded data. For example the players of an American football team. I was using MESASqlite and manually entering the ino and then copying and pasting it into xcode to have all the players preloaded in my app.

Basically, I hear core data is not a database (according to the Apple documentation) so im a little confused.

Answer 1

Using CoreData as a read-only pre-loaded data-store is very possible. In fact, CoreData's faulting mechanism may well work in your favour to keep runtime memory consumption low if the dataset is large. Using CoreData is almost certainly easier than fetching sub-sets of records as required from an SQLite database with SQL. CoreData also provides a solution for versioning, and model version updates.

To do this, you use an SQLite backing store and will need to write a tool to populate the initial model. Note that whilst it's just about feasible to use an SQLite database table editor to modify individual fields, you definitely can't create or delete rows using one.

In terms of a tool for populating the initial model, it makes a lot of sense to make this a MacOSX console or Cocoa application and run it as part of the application's build process. You include the SQLite database as a binary resource in your iOS application.

Building a graphical editing tool is actually far easier in MacOSX than iOS because of the extra KVO bindings on many controls provided by the cocoa framework - for instance, in NSTableView.

Alternatively, you can easily convert data from an existing format such as CSV or XML.

Answer 2

I almost always use Core Data, for pre-populated or empty databases. If you have to handle persisted data, you can either use .plist or database (mostly sqlite) files. The difference is that if you use .plist files, you load the data into NSDictionary objects. On the other hand, if you use Core Data, the persisted information is loaded into "managed" objects, wich are easier to work with. You have several advantages using Core Data (manage several contexts, data model editor, caching, etc.)

If you are not familiar with Core Data you should give it a try