Loading and Caching Time-based Data - objective-c

I'm looking for a good way of caching event entries from a big database so that it's not necessary to load the whole database but only timeframes which contain entries which are currently displayed, selected or otherwise needed. Are there classes in Cocoa or Objective-C programming pattern which provide support to implement this?

I have a property database which pulls down list of available properties for sale. The easiest way I found to do this, was to have a date attribute which gets set when the data is first populated. From then on, only the objects which have a time that's expired are updated when someone attempts to view a property. This was the easiest way I found to control the outcome.

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API object versioning

I'm building an API and I have a question about how to represent objects.
Imagine we have a system with Articles that have a bunch of properties. Some of these properties are complex, for example the Author of the Article refers to another object. We have an URL to fetch all the articles in the system, and another URL to fetch a particular Article.
My first approach to implement this would be to create two representations of the same object Article, because when you request all the articles, it makes sense that you don't retrieve all the information about the Articles, but for example just the title, the date and the name of the author (instead of the whole Author object), excluding other properties like tags, or the content. The idea beneath this is to try to make the response of all the Articles a little bit lighter.
Now I'm going to the client side, and I decide to implement a SDK for Android, for example. So the first step would be to create the objects to store the information that I retrieve from the API. Now a problem pops up, because I want to define the Article object, but I would need two versions of it and it's not only more difficult to implement, but it's going to be more difficult to use.
So my question is, when defining an API, is it a good practice to have multiple versions of the same object (maybe a light one, and a full one) to save some bandwidth when sending the result of a request but generating a more difficult to use service, or it's not worth it and you should retrieve always the same version of the object, generating heavier responses but making the service easier to use?
I work at a company that deals with Articles as well and we also have a REST API to expose the data.
I think you're on the right track, but I'll even take it one step further. These are the potential three calls for large entities in an API:
Index. For the articles, this would be something like /articles. It just returns a list of article ids. You can add parameters to filter, sort, etc. It's very lightweight and I've found it to be very useful.
Header/Mini/Light version. These are only the crucial fields that you think will meet the widest variety of use cases. For us, we have a lot of use cases where we might want to display the top 5 articles, and in those cases, only title, author and maybe publication date. Those fields belong in a "header" article, or a "light" article. This is especially useful for AJAX calls as you don't want to return the entire article (for us the object is quite large.)
Full version. This is the full article. All the text/paragraphs/image references - everything. It's a heavy call to make, but you will be guaranteed to get whatever is available.
Then it just takes discipline to leave the objects the way they are. Ideally users are able to get the version described in (2) to save time over the wire, but if they have to, they go with (3).
I've considered having a dynamic way to return only fields people are interested in, but it would be a lot of implementation. Basically the idea was to let the user go to /article and then show them a sample JSON result. Then the user could click on the fields they wanted returned and get a token. Then they'd pass the token as a parameter to the API and the API would then know which fields to return.
Creates a dynamic schema. Lots of work and I never got around to it, but you can see that if you want to be creative, you can.
Consider whether your data (for one API client) is changing a lot or not. If it's possible to cache data on the client, that'll improve performance by not contacting the API as much. Otherwise I think it's a good idea to have a light-weight and full-scale object type (or more like two views of the same object type).
In the client you should implement it as one object type (to keep it DRY; Don't Repeat Yourself) with all the properties. When fetching a light-weight object, you only store a few of the properties, the rest being null (or similar “undefined” value for the given property type). It should be possible to determine whether all or only a partial subset of the properties are loaded.
When making API requests in the client on a given model (ie. authors) you should be explicit about whether the light-weight or full-scale object is needed and whether cached data is acceptable. This makes it possible to control the data in the UI layer. For example a list of authors might only need to display a name and a number of articles connected with that author. When displaying the author screen, more properties are needed. Also, if using cached data, you should provide a way for the user to refresh it.
When the app works you can start to implement optimizations like: Don't fetch light-weight data if full-scala data is already known & Don't fetch data at all if a recent cache copy exists. I think the best is to look at the actual use cases and improve performance with the highest value for the user.

Is there a Rails convention to persisting lots of query data to the browser?

I have an application that allows the user to drill down through data from a single large table with many columns. It works like this:
There is a list of distinct top-level table values on the screen.
User clicks on it, then the list changes to the distinct next-level values for whatever was clicked on.
User clicks on one of those values, taken to 3rd level values, etc.
There are about 50 attributes they could go through, but it usually ends up only being 3 or 4. But since those 3 or 4 vary among the 50 possible attributes, I have to persist the selections to the browser. Right now I do it in a hideous and bulky hidden form. It works, but it is delicate and suboptimal. In order for it to work, the value of whatever level attribute is on the screen is populated in the appropriate place on the hidden form on the click event, and then a jQuery Ajax POST submits the form. Ugly.
I have also looked at Backbone.js, but I don't want to roll another toolkit into this project while there may be some other simple convention that I'm missing. Is there a standard Rails Way of doing something like this, or just some better way period?
Possible Approaches to Single-Table Drill-Down
If you want to perform column selections from a single table with a large set of columns, there are a few basic approaches you might consider.
Use a client-side JavaScript library to display/hide columns on demand. For example, you might use DataTables to dynamically adjust which columns are displayed based on what's relevant to the last value (or set of values) selected.
You can use a form in your views to pass relevant columns names into the session or the params hash, and inspect those values for what columns to render in the view when drilling down to the next level.
Your next server-side request could include a list of columns of interest, and your controller could use those column names to build a custom query using SELECT or #pluck. Such queries often involve tainted objects, so sanitize that input thoroughly and handle with care!
If your database supports views, users could select pre-defined or dynamic views from the next controller action, which may or may not be more performant. It's at least an idea worth pursuing, but you'd have to benchmark this carefully, and make sure you don't end up with SQL injections or an unmanageable number of pre-defined views to maintain.
Some Caveats
There are generally trade-offs between memory and latency when deciding whether to handle this sort of feature client-side or server-side. It's also generally worth revisiting the business logic behind having a huge denormalized table, and investigating whether the problem domain can't be broken down into a more manageable set of RESTful resources.
Another thing to consider is that Rails won't stop you from doing things that violate the basic resource-oriented MVC pattern. From your question, there is an implied assumption that you don't have a canonical representation for each data resource; approaching Rails this way often increases complexity. If that complexity is truly necessary to meet your application's requirements then that's fine, but I'd certainly recommend carefully assessing your fundamental design goals to see if the functional trade-offs and long-term maintenance burdens are worth it.
I've found questions similar to yours on Stack Overflow; there doesn't appear to be an API or style anyone mentions for persisting across requests. The best you can do seems to be storage in classes or some iteration on what you're already doing:
1) Persistence in memory between sessions/requests
2) Coping with request persistence design-wise
3) Using class caching

Edit a small SQL rowset using forms in Django

I'm interested in displaying 1-5 model instances using forms on a page using a grid similar to something one would find in a desktop database application. I understand I would need to use multiple forms or formsets but an additional requirement is that I'd prefer it to be in more of a grid format with each model's fields being display in columns with common field labels on the y-axis.
I should have the ability to edit multiple columns (so in effect, model instances) at the same time and then commit either the single column (model instance) or commit all. I'd also like to be able to highlight the changed cells that have changed to give visual feedback to the user that there are pending changes.
Sorry for the rather long list of requirements and I'm aware this probably requires a few different technologies/techniques to achieve. I'm throwing this out there because I'm asking this kind community for guidance on what components/technologies I should look at. If luck would have it, there would be some jQuery component that can handle this for me almost out of the box. If not, some guidance on achieving the editing of multiple model instances would be of help.
I will also need to build in versioning in case the data displayed on the view page is stale and to prevent overwriting a newer commit. I'd probably achieve the latter using a versioning field in the table that will perform the check and handle it accordingly.
Also, Flask and Django are both options for the engine and WTForms look to be promising at least at first look.
Thanks
There is no such ready to use solution in Django. Just create your custom form that handles as many instances as you want and do anything that you want, or extend formset.

How to Store lots of text in Core Data

This is a design questions, so multiple ideas will be fine.
In my iPhone app, I keep track of Multiple players' life, which can increase and decrease over time. After the game is done, I want to be able to show them their life throughout the game, so they can see how they did. Now, this will also be stored in Core Data, so they can look over their past games and see how they did.
So, the question is this: What is the best way to do it? I would like this information present in the life log:
time: Player Name - Current Life (Change in Life)
Where those variables would be stored and would be pulled out to display the list. So what's the best way to do this? Should I make a "Life Change" entity in Core Data and have many many of these lines in it? Or is there a better way?
Thanks for your advice!
Have a life entity that is hanging off of a one to many relationship that stores the data that is needed. Then when you display the data, turn those objects into text to display to the user, there is no reason to store thar kind of information as raw text in core data when you just need to store the variables.

When does application state belong in Core Data instead of NSUserDefaults?

I'm trying to decide whether some application state, specifically the selected item in a list, should be stored in Core Data or NSUserDefaults.
Generally I believe that application preferences and state should persist in NSUserDefaults, and model-level data should persist elsewhere, say in Core Data. My model so far is:
Should the data be stored at all? If the user wouldn't reasonably expect it to be, then throw it out (for example, the cursor position is not saved in TextEdit)
NSUserDefaults:
If the application were multi-document, the setting would apply to all documents
It's conceivable that the data would be configured in preferences
Having the data outside of the model makes sense for testing (swapping several defaults with one model store)
Model-level
The data clearly belongs as an attribute of a model-level object
The data is sufficiently large that storing it in NSUserDefaults would cause performance problems
It would be difficult or time-intensive for the user to re-create the data (they would definitely consider the loss of this information "data loss")
I plan to store the sort order of some entities in Core Data. Without this information (i.e. a "sortIndex" or "order" attribute) each entity instance would have to be augmented with data from the user defaults.
However, storing state in the model seems like a slippery slope. If I store sort order then it also seems appropriate to store selection since they are both the state of a list. The selection data for my use case may actually be quite large. Specifically, the icons in one list depend on the selection in each of their sub-lists.
Does anyone have a hard line they draw with respect to NSUserDefaults vs. data model?
You didn't mention whether this is a document-based app (like say, TextEdit) or a library-based one (like say, AddressBook).
That may help you decide where such information should go: assume a document-based app. Assume its documents get placed under version-control (this is actually feasible when using Core Data's XML data store type). Open the app, change the doc's sort orders. Does this dirty the document? Would this change be worth a check-in? Would the change be valuable to other users of this repository?
Typically, sort orderings aren't valuable enough to warrant document-based storage (ala NSTableView's Auto Save Name in Interface Builder). But your app may place a priority on sorting (it sounds like it).
So, there is no hard-and-fast rule. But I think the idea of having a document under version control, potentially shared with others, provides a good intellectual framework to make your case for either side.
I agree with rentzsch, but another way to view it:
Is the selection part of the data or is it metadata? If metadata, is it metadata about a single document or is it state that should apply to any document that happens to be opened next?
Document-specific metadata might want to be stored as an extended attribute. For example, TextMate stores the selection for a document this way, much as BBEdit, MPW, and others used to store tab settings, window size, etc. as a resource in the resource fork. Metadata is considered optional and the document is intact if it is stripped away.
If the selection is an integral part of the data, then by all means store it in the data, using Core Data if you happen to swing that way.
And if it's not a document-based app, then NSUserDefaults is the simplest path since support for it is generally built into common NSView subclasses via bindings.
I personally don't have a hard line between saving preferences in the file itself or in NSUSerDefaults.
But I have always tended towards the obvious:
Application preferences = NSUSerDefaults
Document preferences = in the file itself
For selection state specifically, I would judge if keeping that is important enough to the user. If it is, and important enough to move with the document to another computer, I would keep it in the document itself.
If it isn't important (or applicable) I wouldn't bother with saving it at all.