iOS 6 Foundations

chapter eight

Building on the Data Model

At the end of Chapter 4, “Designing the Party Planner App,” you set up the data model to begin to work with your party data. At the end of Chapter 5, “Walking Through the iPhone Storyboard,” you experimented with adding a button and a text field to the storyboard. These are small steps on the road to building your app. In this chapter, you expand the basic data model and the storyboard and begin to create the interface for your app.

For some people, the idea of databases and data models seems dauntingly complicated. There’s no reason to worry. The concepts you work with in building the data model for Party Planner are exactly the same concepts you work with in organizing a party in real life. You’ll deal with guests, the menu, and details of the party. In the world of relational databases (including Core Data), the words you use to describe these are everyday words that you could use to organize your party.

By the end of this chapter, what you will have are:

• An instantiated object from the data model—a party. It might be called something such as party.

• A view to display the instantiated object. It might be called something such as partyView.

You’ll be able to drill down to the next layer of detail. Within the party object, you’ll have a number of attributes (in database-speak) or properties (in Objective-C-speak). Each one of them will be displayed in a view. (Most of them will be text field views.) Similar naming might identify them ...