Question

I am using CoreData for my iPhone app, but CoreData doesn’t provide an automatic way of allowing you to reorder the records. I thought of using another column to store the order info, but using contiguous numbers for ordering index has a problem. if I am dealing with lots of data, reordering a record potentially involves updating a lot of records on the ordering info (it’s sorta like changing the order of an array element)

What’s the best way to implement an efficient ordering scheme?

Answer 1

FetchedResultsController and its delegate are not meant to be used for user-driven model changes. See the Apple reference doc.
Look for User-Driven Updates part. So if you look for some magical, one-line way, there’s not such, sadly.

What you need to do is make updates in this method:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView moveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)fromIndexPath toIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)toIndexPath {
 userDrivenDataModelChange = YES;

 ...[UPDATE THE MODEL then SAVE CONTEXT]...

 userDrivenDataModelChange = NO;
}

and also prevent the notifications to do anything, as changes are already done by the user:

- (void)controllerWillChangeContent:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller {
 if (userDrivenDataModelChange) return;
 ...
}
- (void)controller:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller didChangeObject:(id)anObject atIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath forChangeType:(NSFetchedResultsChangeType)type newIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)newIndexPath {
 if (userDrivenDataModelChange) return;
 ...
}
- (void)controllerDidChangeContent:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller {
 if (userDrivenDataModelChange) return;
 ...
}

I have just implemented this in my to-do app (Quickie) and it works fine.