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This is a conceptual question about how best to organize relationships between NSManagedObjects in Core Data.
How do you organize your entities in Core Data when there appear to be circular dependencies?
For example, let's say I'm doing a social recipe app. This app allows you to organize meals based on who's making each recipe and who's buying each ingredient. In addition, each recipe is created by a different person. I thus propose the following NSManagedObjects followed by their respective attributes and relationships:
Chef = uniqueID (String), username (String), skill (String)
>> recipesToMake = (to-many) Recipe
>> ingredientsToBuy = (to-many) Ingredient
Recipe = uniqueTitle (String), authorID (String)
>> ingredients = (to-many) Ingredient
Ingredient = name (String), calories (Integer 64)
QUESTIONS
[_] If I have multiple Chef's working on the same recipe, does that mean multiple copies of the same Recipe object are stored in Core Data, each belonging to a separate Chef? If so, is that alright? If not, how to I go about making a single Recipe object in Core Data and having multiple Chef's point to it, when Chef itself can point to-many Recipe objects via recipesToMake?
[_] If given a recipe, how would I check which Chef's are assigned to it? Would I fetch those Chef objects in Core Data that point to a Recipe object with the given uniqueTitle attribute?
[_] Since a Chef object can point to-many Recipe objects, is it thus correct to store the author of each Recipe as an attribute on Recipe containing the author's uniqueID? I initially would have thought to create a relationship from Recipe to-one Chef, but that then creates yet another circular dependency between Chef and Recipe objects.
[_] Yet again, if Chef can point to-many Ingredient objects via ingredientsToBuy and Recipe can point to-many Ingredient objects via ingredients, does that many there will be multiple copies of the same Ingredient object in CoreData?
[_] If I were to allow Recipe objects to have an arbitrary number of authors, how would I go about implementing that? Using a relationship with Chef objects would seem to create a circular dependency, while using attributes connected to Chef uniqueID's would seem to require pre-specifying a maximum number of authors per Recipe object.
The term "circular dependency" is used negatively here, but what you are really referring to in Core Data is relationships and inverse relationships, and its actually recommended.
Circular dependencies are unwanted when you are architecting a system of classes that rely on each other too much and in both directions, also known as coupling. They are indeed not desirable, but it relates more to code flow and logic, not when dealing with data relationships.
Here are answers to your questions:
The onus is on you to the enforce uniqueness of Recipes in your code, which means you have to define the qualities that make two recipes the "same" recipe. You can go so far as to compare each Ingredient of the recipe, or it may suffice that the uniqueTitle is all thats needed to compare for uniqueness of recipe. With that, you can implement the "update or create" design pattern, where you first look up the Recipe by its primary key, which in the simpler scenario is the uniqueTitle. If it already exists, then you can simply read and/or update that object. Otherwise create it as a new managed object. Subsequent queries for it will fetch the just-created object. Each chef then can have a relationship to that single Recipe object.
For every relationship, it's a good practice to also define the inverse relationship. In the Recipe object, call it something like "ChefsMaking", which is probably a to-many relationship that points to Chef objects. (They combine to make a "many-to-many" relationship). In Xcode, theres a drop down box for each relationship where you can set up its inverse.
I do believe its possible to create more than one relationship that references the same type of object. Here there are two types of relationship that point from Recipe to Chef. One is "ChefsMaking", a to-many relationship. The other is "Author", a to-one relationship, the inverse of which would be a to-many "RecipesAuthored" relationship in the Chef object.
The same principles from answer 1 apply here. Define uniqueness of an Ingredient, and have your Chefs and Recipes point to an Ingredient either by fetching one that already exists (by its primary key) or creating a new one.
Simply rename your relationship Authors, and make it a to-many relationship.
Hope this helps!
Say you need to architect an app with an entity that can be associated with multiple other kinds of entities. For example, you have a Picture entity that can be associated with a Meal entity, a Person entity, a Boardroom entity, a Furniture entity, etc. I can think of a number of different ways to address this problem, but -- perhaps because I'm new to Core Data -- I'm not comfortable with any of them.
The most obvious approach that comes to mind is simply creating a relationship between Picture and each entity that supports associated pictures, but this seems sloppy since pictures will have multiple "null pointers."
Another possibility is creating a superentity -- Pictureable -- or something. Every entity that supports associated pictures would be a subentity of Pictureable, and Picture itself would have a one-to-one with Pictureable. I find this approach troubling because it can't be used more than once in the context of a project (since Core Data doesn't support multiple inheritance) AND the way Core Data seems to create one table for any given root entity -- assuming a SQLite backing -- has me afeard of grouping a whole bunch of disparate subentities under the umbrella of a common superentity (I realize that thinking along these lines may smack of premature optimization, so let me know if I'm being a ninny).
A third approach is to create a composite key for Picture that consists of a "type" and a "UID." Assuming every entity in my data model has a UID, I can use this key to derive an associated managed object from a Picture instance and vice versa. This approach worries me because it sounds like it might get slow when fetching en masse; it also doesn't feel native enough to me.
A fourth approach -- the one I'm leaning towards for the app I'm working on -- is creating subentities for both Picture and X (where X is either Meal, Person, Boardroom, etc.) and creating a one-to-one between both of those subentities. While this approach seems like the lesser of all evils, it still seems abstruse to my untrained eye, so I wonder if there's a better way.
Edit 1: In the last paragraph, I meant to say I'm leaning towards creating subentities just for Picture, not both Picture and X.
I think the best variations on this theme are (not necessarily in order):
Use separate entities for the pictures associated with Meal, Person, Boardroom, etc. Those entities might all have the same attributes, and they might in fact all be implemented using the same class. There's nothing wrong with that, and it makes it simple to have a bidirectional relationship between each kind of entity and the entity that stores its picture.
Make the picture an attribute of each of the entity types rather than a separate entity. This isn't a great plan with respect to efficiency if you're storing the actual picture data in the database, but it'd be fine if you store the image as a separate file and store the path to that file in an attribute. If the images or the number of records is small, it may not really be a problem even if you do store the image data in the database.
Use a single entity for all the pictures but omit the inverse relationship back to the associated entity. There's a helpful SO question that considers this, and the accepted answer links to the even more helpful Unidirectional Relationships section of the docs. This can be a nice solution to your problem if you don't need the picture->owner relationship, but you should understand the possible risk before you go down that road.
Give your picture entity separate relationships for each possible kind of owner, as you described in the first option you listed. If you'll need to be able to access all the pictures as a group and you need a relationship from the picture back to its owner, and if the number of possible owner entities is relatively small, this might be your best option even if it seems sloppy to have empty attributes.
As you noticed, when you use inheritance with your entities, all the sub-entities end up together in one big table. So, your fourth option (using sub-entities for each kind of picture) is similar under the hood to your first option.
Thinking more about this question, I'm inclined toward using entity inheritance to create subentities for the pictures associated with each type of owner entity. The Picture entity would store just the data that's associated with any picture. Each subentity, like MealPicture and PersonPicture, would add a relationship to it's own particular sort of owner. This way, you get bidirectional Meal<->MealPicture and Person<->PersonPicture relationships, and because each subentity inherits all the common Picture stuff you avoid the DRY violation that was bugging you. In short, you get most of the best parts of options 1 and 3 above. Under the hood, Core Data manages the pictures as in option 4 above, but in use each of the picture subentities only exposes a single relationship.
Just to expand a bit on Caleb's excellent summation...
I think it's important not to over emphasize the similarities between entities and classes. Both are abstractions that help define concrete objects but entities are very "lightweight" compared to classes. For one thing, entities don't have behaviors but just properties. For another, they exist purely to provide other concrete objects e.g. managed object context and persistent stores, a description of the data model so those concrete objects can piece everything together.
In fact, under the hood, there is no NSEntity class, there is only an NSEnitity***Description*** class. Entities are really just descriptions of how the objects in an object graph will fit together. As such, you really don't get all the overhead an inefficiency of multiplying classes when you multiply entities e.g. having a bunch of largely duplicate entities doesn't slow down the app, use more memory, interfere with method chains etc.
So, don't be afraid to use multiple seemingly redundant entities when that is the simplest solution. In Core Data, that is often the most elegant solution.
I am struggling with esactly this dilemma right now. I have many different entities in my model that can be "quantified". Say I have Apple, Pear, Farmer for all of those Entities, I need a AppleStack, PearStack, FarmerGroup, which are all just object+number. I need a generic approach to this because I want to support it in a model editor I am writing, so I decided I will define a ObjectValue abstract entity with attributes object, value. Then I will create child entities of ObjectValue and will subclass them and declare a valueEntity constant. this way I define it only once and I can write generic code that, for example, returns the possible values of the object relationship. Moreover if I need special attributes (and I actually do for a few of those) I can still add them in the child entities.
I thought it was about time to have a look at OO databases and decided to use db4o for my next little project - a small library.
Consider the following objects: Book, Category.
A Book can be in 0-n categories and a Category can be applied to 0-m Books.
My first thought is to have a joining object such as BookCatecory but after a bit of Googling I see that this is not appropriate for 'Real OO'.
So another approach (recommended by many) is to have a list in both objects: Book.categories and Category.books. One side handles the relationship: Book.addCategory adds Category to Book.categories and Book to Category.books. How to handle commits and rollbacks when 2 objects are been altered within one method call?
What are your thoughts? The second approach has obvious advantages but, for me at least, the first 'feels' right (better normed).
There are really only two ways I can think of to solve this problem, both of which you've mentioned. Personally, I would go with the first approach (creating a mapping object as an OO entity). This prevents you from keeping redundant information around and having to synchronize; it also means that if the association ends up having fields of its own (the date that the book was assigned to that category, let's say), they can be incorporated easily. We use this approach for a variety of associations in our system.
The OO entities would look like:
BookCategory {
Book book
Category category
}
Book {
Collection <BookCategory> categories
}
Category {
Collection <BookCategory> categories
}
Here you have to keep the relation object and the two collections in synch; however, the collections are optional in this case. Typically you could get the same information with an ORM query, something like:
select b.book from BookCategory b where b.category = MyCategory
The alternative is to have a setup like:
Book {
Collection<Category> categories
}
Category {
Collection<Books> books
}
If your ORM/DB tool automatically maintains the associations, this is fine; otherwise, you are stuck updating both collections. (In Hibernate, one side will have the property: inverse=true on the mapping; this side is not updated, so strictly speaking it doesn't need to be maintained. This seems to me like bad practice, though.)
If you typically only access the relation one way (for example, getting all of the books in a category), you could eliminate the collection on other side; then I think you would have to work around the ORM tool and use a native query in order to access the relationship from the other direction.
We use Hibernate (a java-based Object Relational Mapping tool) on our project; the Hibernate docs are a good reference for OO/relational design problems, though you may have to spend a little time learning Hibernate to make them useful:
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html_single/#collections-ofvalues
HTH!
If you use object database you don't need to care how relations are stored in database. You define classes and relationships between them. Please read the reference guided to your database. Examples of relationships:
n:n attribute, referencing from the parent
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
List addresses;
}
class Address {
}
n:n attribute, referencing from the child
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
}
class Address {
List persons
}
n:n attribute, bidirectional references
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
List addresses;
}
class Address {
List persons
}
I think you're just a little hung up on the relational db way of thinking. Lists in each object is the right OO thing to do. Commits and rollbacks are no problem, they happen in a transaction that commits everything or rolls back everything.
In a pure OO database such as GemStone the objects themselves have collections of references to other objects. When the object is referenced from the application the OODBMS generates a proxy that wraps the object. The schema for this is just the persisted object and its collection of references to the objects it refers to. The OODBMS does not necessarily need a link entity.
With an O/R mapping layer (assuming it is clever enough to do M:M relationships) the M:M relationship is manifested as a collection of subsidiary references on the object itself which the O/R mapper resolves to the link entity behind the scenes. Not all O/R mappers do this, so you may have a separate link object.
Do you have any particular reason you wanted to use an ODBMS? For simple data structures (such as categorizing books) you generally won't find any advantage in ODBMS over RDBMS, and in fact will have an easier time working in the much-more-standardized world of RDBMS. ODBMS has very tangible advantages when you are working with complex data types or literal persistence/storage of dynamic objects. ODBMS also is cited as being much faster and more scalable than RDBMS, though I can offer little insight into this myself. Here are a couple pages that discuss RDBMS vs. ODBMS, however:
Whatever Happened to Object-Oriented Databases
Object-Oriented Database vs. Object-Rleational Database (SO)
I would avoid data duplication because then you run into all kinds of problems with merging the differences.
the trick to this is references.
the result is that I would have each object contain a collection of references to the other object type as well as having an independent collection of the other objects.
The matching table is a relational concept, unless that intermediary connecting class may have properties that are not attributable to either of the objects. It is there as it enables queries to be written in a powerful manner as it reduces the relation to 2 one to many relations and greatly reduces data duplication. If you did this in a relation database without the matching table then things would get evil very quickly - how would an update operate? Personally i find the attraction of oo databases to be stepping away from this
the way that i would tie all the objects together is via events in code to some kind of transaction handler to allow the caching of objects states. so rather than objects manipulating each others properties they request a change through the handler and await the result in a callback.
Let's say I have two Entity classes: SocialApp and SocialAppType
In SocialApp I have one Attribute: appURL and one Relationship: type.
In SocialAppType I have three Attributes: baseURL, name and favicon.
The destination of the SocialApp relationship type is a single record in SocialAppType.
As an example, for multiple Flickr accounts, there would be a number of SocialApp records, with each record holding a link to a person's account. There would be one SocialAppType record for the "Flickr" type, that all SocialApp records would point to.
When I build an application with this schema, I get a warning that there is no inverse relationship between SocialAppType and SocialApp.
/Users/username/Developer/objc/TestApp/TestApp.xcdatamodel:SocialApp.type: warning: SocialApp.type -- relationship does not have an inverse
Do I need an inverse, and why?
Apple documentation has an great example that suggest a situation where you might have problems by not having an inverse relationship. Let's map it into this case.
Assume you modeled it as follows:
Note you have a to-one relationship called "type", from SocialApp to SocialAppType. The relationship is non-optional and has a "deny" delete rule.
Now consider the following:
SocialApp *socialApp;
SocialAppType *appType;
// assume entity instances correctly instantiated
[socialApp setSocialAppType:appType];
[managedObjectContext deleteObject:appType];
BOOL saved = [managedObjectContext save:&error];
What we expect is to fail this context save since we have set the delete rule as Deny while relationship is non optional.
But here the save succeeds.
The reason is that we haven't set an inverse relationship. Because of that, the socialApp instance does not get marked as changed when appType is deleted. So no validation happens for socialApp before saving (it assumes no validation needed since no change happened). But actually a change happened. But it doesn't get reflected.
If we recall appType by
SocialAppType *appType = [socialApp socialAppType];
appType is nil.
Weird, isn't it? We get nil for a non-optional attribute?
So you are in no trouble if you have set up the inverse relationship.
Otherwise you have to do force validation by writing the code as follows.
SocialApp *socialApp;
SocialAppType *appType;
// assume entity instances correctly instantiated
[socialApp setSocialAppType:appType];
[managedObjectContext deleteObject:appType];
[socialApp setValue:nil forKey:#"socialAppType"]
BOOL saved = [managedObjectContext save:&error];
In practice, I haven't had any data loss due to not having an inverse - at least that I am aware of. A quick Google suggests you should use them:
An inverse relationship doesn't just
make things more tidy, it's actually
used by Core Data to maintain data
integrity.
-- Cocoa Dev Central
You should typically model
relationships in both directions, and
specify the inverse relationships
appropriately. Core Data uses this
information to ensure the consistency
of the object graph if a change is
made (see “Manipulating Relationships
and Object Graph Integrity”). For a
discussion of some of the reasons why
you might want to not model a
relationship in both directions, and
some of the problems that might arise
if you don’t, see “Unidirectional
Relationships.”
-- Core Data Programming Guide
I'll paraphrase the definitive answer I found in More iPhone 3 Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LeMarche.
Apple generally recommends that you always create and specify the inverse, even if you don't use the inverse relationship in your app. For this reason, it warns you when you fail to provide an inverse.
Relationships are not required to have an inverse, because there are a few scenarios in which the inverse relationship could hurt performance. For example, suppose the inverse relationship contains an extremely large number of objects. Removing the inverse requires iterating over the set that represents the inverse, weakening performance.
But unless you have a specific reason not to, model the inverse. It helps Core Data ensure data integrity. If you run into performance issues, it's relatively easy to remove the inverse relationship later.
There is at least one scenario where a good case can be made for a core data relationship without an inverse: when there is another core data relationship between the two objects already, which will handle maintaining the object graph.
For instance, a book contains many pages, while a page is in one book. This is a two-way many-to-one relationship. Deleting a page just nullifies the relationship, whereas deleting a book will also delete the page.
However, you may also wish to track the current page being read for each book. This could be done with a "currentPage" property on Page, but then you need other logic to ensure that only one page in the book is marked as the current page at any time. Instead, making a currentPage relationship from Book to a single page will ensure that there will always only be one current page marked, and furthermore that this page can be accessed easily with a reference to the book with simply book.currentPage.
What would the reciprocal relationship be in this case? Something largely nonsensical. "myBook" or similar could be added back in the other direction, but it contains only the information already contained in the "book" relationship for the page, and so creates its own risks. Perhaps in the future, the way you are using one of these relationships is changed, resulting in changes in your core data configuration. If page.myBook has been used in some places where page.book should have been used in the code, there could be problems. Another way to proactively avoid this would also be to not expose myBook in the NSManagedObject subclass that is used to access page. However, it can be argued that it is simpler to not model the inverse in the first place.
In the example outlined, the delete rule for the currentPage relationship should be set to "No Action" or "Cascade", since there is no reciprocal relationship to "Nullify". (Cascade implies you are ripping every page out of the book as you read it, but that might be true if you're particularly cold and need fuel.)
When it can be demonstrated that object graph integrity is not at risk, as in this example, and code complexity and maintainability is improved, it can be argued that a relationship without an inverse may be the correct decision.
An alternative solution, as discussed in the comments, is to create your own UUID property on the target (in the example here, every Page would have an id that is a UUID), store that as a property (currentPage just stores a UUID as an Attribute in Book, rather than being a relationship), and then write a method to fetch the Page with the matching UUID when needed. This is probably a better approach than using a relationship without an inverse, not the least because it avoids the warning messages discussed.
The better question is, "is there a reason not to have an inverse"? Core Data is really an object graph management framework, not a persistence framework. In other words, its job is to manage the relationships between objects in the object graph. Inverse relationships make this much easier. For that reason, Core Data expects inverse relationships and is written for that use case. Without them, you will have to manage the object graph consistency yourself. In particular, to-many relationships without an inverse relationship are very likely to be corrupted by Core Data unless you work very hard to keep things working. The cost in terms of disk size for the inverse relationships really is insignificant in comparison to the benefit it gains you.
While the docs don't seem to require an inverse, I just resolved a scenario that did in fact result in "data loss" by not having an inverse. I have a report object that has a to-many relationship on reportable objects. Without the inverse relationship, any changes to the to-many relationship were lost upon relaunch. After inspecting the Core Data debug it was apparent that even though I was saving the report object, the updates to the object graph (relationships) were never being made. I added an inverse, even though I don't use it, and voila, it works. So it might not say it's required but relationships without inverses can definitely have strange side effects.
Inverses are also used for Object Integrity (for other reasons, see the other answers):
The recommended approach is to model relationships in both directions
and specify the inverse relationships appropriately. Core Data uses
this information to ensure the consistency of the object graph if a
change is made
From: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreData/HowManagedObjectsarerelated.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001075-CH17-SW1
The provided link gives you ideas why you should have an inverse set. Without it, you can lose data/integrety. Also, the chance that you access an object which is nil is more likely.
There is no need for inverse relationship generally. But there are few quirks/bugs in Core data where you need an inverse relationship. There are cases where relationships/objects go missing , even though there is no error while saving the context, if there are missing inverse relationship. Check this example, which I created to demonstrate objects missing and how to workaround, while working with Core data
I have two items A and B, which have a uni directional one-to-one relationship. (A has one B)
In the database these are represented by ATable and BTable, and they are linked together by ABTable. (From the database setup it appears there is a many-to-many relationship but there is not, it was done this way for normalization reasons).
The problem is due to this setup, I have only been able to get NHibernate to map this as a many-to-many relationship between the entities. Is there anyway of making the entities have a one-to-one relationship?
The best I could think of is to leave its has a many to many relationship, and then have two properties on the A entity one that returns a List of B, which would satisfy the mapping and a second non-mapped property that would get the first B from the list, to satisfy my application. - but this seems un-eligant.
Are you sure you mean a one-to-one? I've had so many people ask for one-to-one's when they really mean many-to-one's.
Anyway, short of changing your schema, the easiest thing is what you suggested; however, to make it a little cleaner, you can make the collections private so you're only exposing the two properties that fetch the first item. You can see the various methods in Fluent NHibernate for mapping private properties on the wiki.
You might try combining the join-table with one-to-one mappings in various ways. A join-table mapping permits a single class to be persisted across more than one table which have a one-to-one relationship.