Professional iPhone® and iPad™ Database Application Programming

Chapter 5. Introducing Core Data

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Describing what the Core Data API can do for you

• Understanding the various objects that make up the Core Data API

• Understanding how the template code works to configure your application to use Core Data

• Creating a simple application that uses Core Data to maintain application state

Now that you have completed the first part of the book, you should be comfortable using an SQLite database and implementing views into your data with the UITableView control. You have learned to build data-driven applications for the iPhone that can efficiently access large amounts of data stored in an SQLite database and display that data with your own, highly customized, tables.

Up until this point, you have not looked at how to store the data that users create on the device. For instance, if you wanted to create a task manager, you would need to be able to save the user-created tasks. You could use SQLite to INSERT the data, now that you know how to execute arbitrary SQL statements against the database. However, there is an API designed specifically for storing the objects in your application model: Core Data.

In this chapter, you learn about the architecture of the Core Data API and the classes that you use to build a Core Data application. You will walk through a Core Data template application to learn how to implement the architecture in code. Then you will learn how to build a simple application that uses Core Data for storage.

This chapter prepares ...