NSFetchRequest in Core Data - core-data

I am having a very hard time understanding what needs to be included in the Children Views in order to perform a fetch request and display the results in a table view when using Core Data. All the examples I have found are either only one layer deep (Random Dates), using the Root View Controller which always works, or using several view controllers with pictures and other attributes (Recipes) that make it confusing for me to follow.
An example of what I am looking for would be an Entity with three attributes. The entity is album and the three attributes are albumTitle, albumArtist and yearRecorded.
Now in my Navigation app my Root View Controller has three rows to choose from not using the Entity or Core Data at all. The three choices are "Title", "Artist" and "Year". When you click on one of the three rows it will push a new view controller and list all of the appropriate attributes in a new table view.
I believe it should be very simple and not require too much code but I can't get a handle on it. Any explanations or sample code is greatly appreciated.

You could just make a fetch request with no predicates to get all the objects from your Core Data store, so, you'll have an array of songs.
Than you just call, for example, [fetchedSongs valueForKeyPath:#"artist"]; to get an arry of artist and add it as a source to your tableview.

Related

filtering/searching on a repeat control

In my application, i would like to replace a viewpanel with a repeat control.
However, part of the functionality is there is a UI aspect that allows users to select certain fields (that correspond to the view), and only display the documents that match. The view is doing a filter that allows users to select aspects of the view to create a search (the code is under search of the view) that allows the view panel to be updated with the results of the search.
one of the things that is curious is that the viewpanel has a value of "#{javascript:view2}" vice an actual view name.
The viewpanel defines the search view and the ...
I'd like to be able to apply that same functionality to the repeat control. I don't see those attributes on the repeat control... Any pointers? Its been a while since i've worked with xpages... long enough that I've forgotten a lot already....
TIA !
Read this blog post I did a while back, it should explain what you need.
The view panel doesn't filter anything, it just displays rows from a datasource, same as a repeat control. Indeed you can add components to a ViewPanel's column, pulling from the current row by adding a var property to the dominoView datasource.
The view is bound to #{javascript:view2} (which would be better done by binding to #{view2} - there's no need to call SSJS here). view2 is a dominoView datasource somewhere on your page. The datasource is a wrapper that has properties to capture the settings for filtering and searching that you want to do. At runtime, they are calculated and changes the ViewEntries in the datasource.
Finally there's is the underlying Domino View object available also to LotusScript. This holds and will always hold all entries. The dominoView datasource queries that using the filtering and searching properties and retrieves a ViewEntryCollection or a ViewNavigator.
So whether you use a View Panel, Repeat Control, Data View or whatever else, those are just components to visually represent a collection of ViewEntries or Documents. All can be bound to a dominoView datasource. Where repeat controls and Data Views give you extra power is you can bind them to any kind of collection, not just a dominoView datasource (e.g. DocumentCollection, ViewEntryCollection, multi-value field, Java collection, etc).
I often find that doing the searches in Java and then passing the results to the repeat as a List work better and allow more options. I can get all the information I need in Java and load that into a Map or Tree. This gives me the ability to do custom sorting in the Java class and also to combine data from other views/databases easily. Since the data is now in memory it gets reloaded fast. The only thing you have to watch for is the size of the data. If you have a view with many entries (10K?) you might not want to load everything into memory...
Howard
I'm not sure if you've found a solution yet, but consider using jQuery dataTables. Oliver Busse wrote a very detailed blog post about integrating dataTables into XPages.
To get the specific formatting, I used a repeat control to include the "td", "tr" and "thead" attributes Oliver listed in his blog post.

How to create and fetch relational records in core data

Total newbie question now... Suffice to say, I have searched for a completely noddy explanation but have not found anything 'dumb' enough. The problem is...
I have created a core data stack in which I have a entity called 'Client' and an entity called 'Car'. It is a one-to-many relationship.
So far i have successfully created and fetched the client list using code from apple's tutorial. Once I select a client, I then push a new tableViewController which should list the Cars for that chosen client.
First question...
I am used to sql style database programming where if I wanted to add a car to a client, I would simply add a 'ClientID' tag to the 'Car' record thereby providing the relationship to a specific client. How do I do the equivalent in core data? My understanding from my reading is adding attributes to point to other entities isnt necessary - core data maintains this relationship for you without needing additional attributes in the entities.
Second question...
As and when I have created a 'car' entity and successfully linked it to a 'Client'. How to I create a fetch which will retrieve just THAT client's cars. I could alter the code from apple to fetch ALL cars but I don't know how to fetch cars associated with a given client. From my reading, I think I need to use predicates, but apples predicate documentation stands alone and does not give clear guidance on how to use it with core data
I realise how noddy this is, but I cant find an idiots guide anywhere...
Any help/code exmaples much appreciated.
OK, I have answered my own question. For those who have found my question and would like to know the answer, it is extremely simple...
Firstly, to create a 'Car' and associate it with a 'Client'. Firstly create a 'Car' as you normally would and simply add this line of code...
newCar.client = client;
This sets the 'client' relationship on the 'Car' record to the client in question.
Secondly, I had thought that if you had a client and needed to find their cars, you would need a new fetch. But not so! Simply use the following lines of code...
NSSet *cars = client.cars;
[self setCarsArray:[cars allObjects]];
The first line uses "client.cars" o follow the object graph to determine the cars this client has and populates them in an NSSet. The second line then populates a NSArray which is declared in the current viewcontroller which can be used to for display purposes.
Sorted!!

Help applying DDD to dynamic form application

I am designing an application that will display dynamically-generated forms to the user who will then enter values into the form fields and submit those values for persistence. The form represents an employee evaluation.
One use case allows an administrator (from HR) to define the form fields. They should be able to create a new form, add/remove fields from a form and mark a form as 'deleted'.
The second use case is when a manager views the form and enters values into the form fields for a specific employee. They should be able to save the values at any time and recall the saved values when viewing the form again for the same employee.
Finally, when the manager is satisfied with the values they've entered for that employee, they can 'submit' the form data which persists the flattened data into the data warehouse for reporting purposes. When this is done, the 'working' copy of the data is removed so the form will display empty the next time they view it for that employee.
I am not concerned with the front-end at this point and working on the back-end service application that sits between the client and the data store. The application must provide a course-grained interface for all of the behavior required.
My question is how many aggregate roots do I actually have (and from that, how many repositories, etc)? Do I separate the form definition from the form data even though I need both when displaying the form to the user?
I see two main entities, 'EmployeeEvaluationSchema' and 'EmployeeEvaluation'. The 'EmployeeEvaluationSchema' entity would have a collection of 'FieldDefinition' value objects which would contain the properties that define a field, the most basic being the name of the field. The 'EmployeeEvaluation' entity would have a collection of 'FieldValue' value objects which contain the values for each field from the definition. In the simplest case, it would have a field name and value property. Next, the 'EmployeeEvaluation' could have a reference to 'EmployeeEvaluationSchema' to specify which definition the particular evaluation is based on. This can also be used to enforce the form definition in each evaluation. You would have two repositories - one for each entity. If you were to use an ORM such as NHibernate, then when you retrieve a 'EmployeeEvaluation' entity, the associated 'EmployeeEvaluationSchema' would also be retrieved even though there is a dedicated repository for it.
From your description it sounds like your objects don't have any behavior and are simple DTOs. If that is the case maybe you should not bother doing DDD. Can you imagine your entities without having getters? There are better ways to do CRUDish application than DDD. Again this is only valid if your "domain" does not have relevant behavior.

NSTableView content based on a selection of another NSArrayController

The issue
I have a popup button (NSPopUpButton) that is bound to an NSArrayController. This array controller handles parent objects that each have a collection of child objects. I have an NSTableView in which I need to show these children for the selected item in popup. In addition, the list of children needs to be manipulated (add/remove).
I've tried to accomplish this in many ways but always run into some thing that complicates the solution. What is the best way to implement this?
The data is managed here by Core Data and thus, the collections are NSSets. I've tried adding a conversion method in the parent to return a sorted NSArray (in order to bind it with NSArrayController) but this approach prevents the KVO and the array controller is not updated properly.
Thank you in advance.
An example
To clarify, here's a hypothetic example:
Let's say I have a list of countries that is maintained elsewhere. One of these countries is selected in a popup button. Each country has a set of cities. When a country is selected a table view is populated by it's cities.
There is a solution for this without the delegate/datasource setup.
My context is this:
CoreData model with Parents and Children, one Parent has multiple Children via a relationship named children. Both have a attribute name.
The two Entities must be available as classes (each with a .m and a .h). (Xcode will write them for you if you go to File-New-File-CoreData-NSManagedObjectSubclass.) Now the ChildObjects of a ParentObject can be accessed by ParentObject.children
Two NSArrayControllers: ParentArrayController and ChildArrayController.
Two NSTableViews: ParentTable and ChildTable, each with one column for name. (It should not matter whether you use a Popup or a table as long as it's controlled by a NSArrayController.)
The steps to take are as follows:
Connect both NSArrayControllers to the MangagedObjectContext as usual and set them to Mode: Entity Name with their respective Entity (Parent or Child)
Bind both TableViews (their columns) to their NSArrayController as usual.
Now comes the magic: In the ChildArrayControllers binding section under ControllerContent-ContentSet bind to the ParentArrayController with ControllerKey: selection and ModelKeyPath: children.
Done. If you select a ParentObject in the ParentTable the ChildTable shows its children.
To add and remove children to parents you can use the (void)addChildrenObject:(Child *)value; method that Xcode wrote for you in the Parents.m class file.
I didn't find any way to implement this by simply with dragging and dropping. I had to implement a delegate and data source for the table of cities (from the example). The window controller is notified of the selection changes in the popup button and this updates the content on the table view delegate / data source.
I actually feel this is little bit better way to implement the issue (than with bindings and array controllers) since it gives more control over special cases.

NSArrayController that is sorted and unique (no duplicates) for use in a pop-up in a core-data app

I have core data app with an entity OBSERVATION that has as one of its attributes DEALNAME.
I want to reference through Interface Builder or by making custom modifications to an NSArrayController a list of unique sorted dealnames so that I can use them in a pop-up.
I have attempted to use #distinctUnionOfSets (and #distinctUnionOfArrays) but am unable to locate the proper key sequence.
I can sort the ArrayController by providing a sort descriptor, but do not know how to eliminate duplicates.
Are the #distinct... keys the right methodology? It would seem to provide the easiest way to optimize the use of IB.
Is there a predicate form for removing duplicates?
Or do I need to use my custom controller to extract an NSSet of the specific dealnames, put them back in an array and sort it and reference the custom array from IB?
Any help would be appreciated. I am astounded that other have not tried to create a sorted-unique pop-up in tableviews.
You need to take a look at -[NSFetchRequest returnsDistinctResults]. That is the level you need to be handling the uniquing of data.
Although I do not have a definitive answer for you, I think there are two ways you can go about it.
The way you already started. You need to bind the contents array of the PopUp button, not just against the arrayController.arrangedObjects, but continue on the path and somehow filter only objects with distinct "DealName"s. This means - the arrayController presents ALL the entities (and may sort them for you) but the PopUp button will have its contents filter via some sophisticated binding to the array controller.
Make your filtering at the ArrayController level (as suggested in another answer here). Here it depends how you set up the array controller. If It is set up to use an "Entity" (vs. "Class") which means the array controller will fetch CoreData entities directly - you can modify its "Fetch" to only bring a subset of the "OBSERVATION" entities with distinct values of "DEALNAME". I don't know how to control WHICH entities are filtered out in this case. Otherwise, you can setup the arrayController to work with "Class" objects, and then you can fetch the entities yourself (in code) and populate the arrayController programmatically, with just the entities you like.
In the second option, the Popup button should be bound normally to the arrayController's arrangedObjects.

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