Core Data for iOS: Developing Data-Driven Applications for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

Today, virtually every non-trivial iPhone and iPad app must manage data—quickly, smoothly, reliably, and with minimal impact on the CPU to conserve battery life. Core Data, Apple’s ready-made data persistence layer, can help you achieve all these goals. In Core Data for iOS, two leading iOS developers teach you the entire Core Data framework from the ground up. Writing for intermediate-to-advanced iOS developers, Tim Isted and Tom Harrington thoroughly explain how Core Data is used on iOS devices, introduce each of its primary classes, and show how they interact to provide amazing functionality with minimal configuration. You’ll learn how to store, fetch, and validate data; provide it efficiently to views; and much more. Isted and Harrington first give you a firm grounding in the technology, and then present real-world examples. They present multiple sample projects, as well as a start-to-finish, chapter-length case study. Coverage includes

• Understanding Core Data’s features, classes, and interactions
• Using Core Data in MVC-based iOS app development
• Mapping relational data to object models, and building them with Xcode 4’s Data Modeler
• Working with managed objects and using UITableView to display them
• Creating predicates to match numbers, data, and objects
• Maintaining compatibility across versions of an app’s data model
• Tracking managed object contexts across view controllers
• Using Core Data’s automatic Undo functionality
• Integrating abstract entities, entity inheritance, and multiple view controllers into a complete app
• Optimizing for iOS devices’ tight memory limits
• Diagnosing and fixing common Core Data problems

Introducing Addison-Wesley’s new Core Frameworks Series, written for experienced iOS developers by world-class Mac and iOS developers, these are the first comprehensive, code-rich reference guides to Apple’s Core Frameworks.

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1. An Overview of Core Data on iOS Devices
Chapter 2. A Core Data Primer
Chapter 3. Modeling Your Data

Part II: Working with Core Data
Chapter 4. Basic Storing and Fetching
Chapter 5. Using NSFetchedResultsController
Chapter 6. Working with Managed Objects
Chapter 7. Working with Predicates
Chapter 8. Migration and Versioning
Chapter 9. Working with Multiple View Controllers and Undo

Part III: Building a Simple Core Data Application
Chapter 10. Sample Application: Note Collector

Part IV: Optimizing and Troubleshooting
Chapter 11. Optimizing for iOS Performance and Memory Requirements
Chapter 12. Troubleshooting Core Data