Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 19. Core Data

In This Chapter

• Discovering the greatness of Core Data

• Creating your Core Data project

• Defining your model

• Building your interface

After you have some experience programming applications for the Macintosh, you soon realize that you spend an inordinate amount of time doing some of the same tasks over and over. One aspect in particular that you find yourself repeating is handling data. Many applications help users with data management. For example, a recipe application might help users organize information like ingredients, steps in a recipe, and special cooking instructions. Other applications — for example, iTunes — might assist users in organizing, sorting, and managing media files like music and video.

So many applications helping users with data aren't a surprise. Computers are exceedingly good at managing data, and lots of it. What might be surprising though is that programmers usually have to do all the hard work of writing code to handle all this data — until now. In this chapter, I show you how Cocoa makes adding data management to your projects easy with Core Data.

What's So Great about Core Data Anyway?

Core Data is a relative newcomer to the Cocoa programming scene, but don't let its youth and inexperience dissuade you from unleashing its talents. Core Data is a framework of around a dozen pre-made classes that allows you to easily add data management to your applications. And oftentimes, Core Data can do so without you even writing a single line of code! ...