What features does mogenerator provide?

Question

I've been using mogenerator for a while now, and while there is a reasonable Getting Started Guide and a Stack Exchange article on the command line options, I haven't found a good guide for all of the functionality it provides. In short: what, above and beyond the classes that Core Data provides for you, what does mogenerator actually generate?

(Frankly, I kept finding little pleasant surprises in the headers/implementations that I didn't realize were in there and I decided to step through the mogenerator templates and code and document what I found in a Stack Exchange Q&A. I'd love to see additional answers and edits, however. )

Answer 1

In addition to its core feature of a two class system, mogenerator helps you by automatically implementing a number of best practices regarding Core Data in your machine header and implementation files.

Property Accessors

Methods to access the attributes of your Entities are the core of what mogenerator generates. But there are some nice features implemented in the accessors above and beyond what the out of the box Xcode class generator provides to you.

Scalar Accessors

Xcode's built in generator gives you the option of "use scalar properties for primitive data types". This option gives you choice of having Xcode create properties with NSTimeIntervals instead of NSDates for date types, BOOLs instead of NSNumbers for boolean types, and int16_t (or similar) rather than NSNumbers.

I find this infuriating because most of the time I prefer the primitive types, but not for NSDates which are much more useful than a NSTimeInterval. So Core Data is giving me the choice of objects, in which case I will be constantly unboxing stuff and making stupid mistakes like if(myBooleanAttribute) (which is always YES because myBooleanAttribute is a NSNumber, not a BOOL). Or I can have scalars, but in that case, I get NSTimeIntervals that I'll always have to convert to NSDates. Or I can hand edit all of the generated files by hand to give me my desired mix of NSDates and BOOLs.

On the other hand, mogenerator provides you with both options. For example, you will get both a myBooleanAttribute getter that gives you an NSNumber (for easy storage in an NSArray) and a myBooleanAttributeValue getter that gives you an actual BOOL. Same with integers and floats. (Mogenerator does not generate NSTimeInterval accessors: only NSDates.)

Typed Transformable Properties

If you have a transformable property, you can set a specific UserInfo key ( attributeValueClassName ) in the attribute that will specify the class that your property will return/accept. (And it will properly forward declare the class etc.) The only place I found this documented was on Verious.

In contrast, the Xcode code generator will only type these transformable attributes as id types.

Validation Declaration

While mogenerator does not automatically generate any validation methods, it does include the proper signature as a comment in the machine h file. The seems to largely be for historical reasons, but it does mean that it is easy to copy and paste the signature if you decide to implement it in your human file implementation. (I wouldn't actually uncomment the declaration as you aren't supposed to call validation directly.)

Primitive Accessors

Core Data already provides you these accessors to the primitive values, but for some reason doesn't include them in its Xcode generated headers. Having mogenerator include them in its header files makes it much easier to access a primitive value.

Fetched Properties

mogenerator will generate accessors for fetched properties. As far as I can tell there is no way to have the Xcode generator do this.

Helper methods

Automatic NSFetchedResultsController generation

If you have a to many relationship in your Entity and you pass --template-var frc=true into mogenerator, mogenerator will automatically generate a method to create a fetch request for the child objects associated with a parent object. It even automatically generates a unique cache name, and isolates everything inside an #if TARGET_OS_IPHONE preprocessor macro.

Even if this doesn't fit your particular needs, it is a great example of how the templates can be extended.

+fetchMyFetchRequest:moc_

If you like defining your fetch requests in the model, this is a lot better way to retrieve them than hardcoded strings.

-MyEntitySet

Mogenerator uses the magic of KVC to give you a NSMutableSet proxy into your relationships.

+entityName

Need to provide a entity name to a NSFetchRequest or other Core Data method? It's easy to avoid hard coded strings by using this simple method that returns the name of the entity as an NSString.

+insertInManagedObjectContext: and entityInManagedObjectContext:

Another way to avoid hardcoding entity names is to use these helper methods.

Typed object ids

Each of your headers and implementations also includes a MyEntityID class. They are empty interfaces and implementations that merely subclass the NSManagedObjectID class. Also, each model class has a helper method called objectID that overrides the standard objectID method in NSManagedObject. The helper method does nothing but cast the superclass's return value to the MyEntityID type.

The net result: the compiler can catch your mistakes if you ever accidentally interchange your object ids from different entities.

Miscellaneous

Subclassing a Custom Superclass

One of the command line options is --base-class: which allows you to specify a base class that all of your generated classes will inherit from. This is very useful, either so that you can have a base class where you define convenience methods (which, given Core Data, you probably should) or so you can use an off the shelf Core Data toolkit like SSDataKit (or both).

includem

A simple little thing, but if you specify a --includem argument, mogenerator will generate a header file that includes all of your model header files. Convenient if you want to include all of your headers in a PCH, or something some other standard header you include.

Const Definitions of All Attributes, Relationships, Fetched Properties

An extern declaration of a struct is included in the header that has an NSString defined for every attribute and relationship defined in your Entity. This allows you to define predicates and other parameters, without baking the names of your entities into your strings. For example,

req.predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:
@"(%K == YES) AND (%K <= %@)",MyObject.favorite, MyObject.availableDate, [NSDate date]];

(This type of struct used for "namespaced" constants is described My Mike Ash on his blog

const Definitions of User Info Keys/Values

Similarly an extern declaration of a struct is defined in the header that includes the keys as members of the struct, and the values as a values. i.e.

NSLog(@"User info for key my key is %@",MyObjectInfo.mykey) //will log "myvalue" 

Alternate Templates

One of the interesting things about mogenerator is that in building mogenerator its author (Wolf Rentzsch) has basically built a generic parser and templating engine for the xcdatamodel files produced by Xcode. So you don't need to use the mogenerator templates. You can provide your own with a simple command line argument. There are lots of user contributed templates on the GitHub site.

In fact, you don't even have to use Core Data. Many of the contributed templates allow you to generate a series of ordinary NSObject model classes based on the data model. (So called PONSOs: "plain old nsobjects"). Want to use the data modeler in Xcode, but some other persistence mechanism? mogenerator can help you there.

You don't even need to generate objects at all: another interesting submitted template just provides a diff of two different model versions.