Head First iPhone and iPad Development, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Implementing search with core data: Looking for info

It’s not enough to just be able to see data anymore. The era of big data is here and just being able to look at it doesn’t get you very far anymore. Now you probably won’t have a couple of petabytes on your phone (famous last words), but you will most likely have enough data that you’ll need to be able to sort and filter it to make it useful for your users. Core Data comes with some built-in functionality to slice through stacks of data and we’re going to show you how to use it!

The app is working, but it’s limited...

The first beta went over to HFN but it doesn’t have all the functionality they want. You’ve gotten the app to the point where it can hold and display episodes, and users can add their own. But once you get a big chunk of data in there, there’s a usability issue.

Imagine a giant list of TV shows and you’re trying to find just one....

HFN: Head First Network

Hi!

Thanks for getting that done—it looks great, but functionality is a little limited. We’d like our users to be able to do some data stuff:

• Sort the data according to time or date

• Search the data for keywords

Right now, once we have a lot of shows in there, it becomes tricky to find a particular episode or information about it. Adding search and sort would help a lot.

Thanks!

Relax

We’re going to get to explaining the FetchedResultsController ...