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Asked: 2026-06-02T20:21:45+00:00

I am working on a media DB application. I have a custom model with

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I am working on a media DB application. I have a custom model with data storage and think about rewriting it to Core Data. One use case that is of particular interest to me is movie storage. I store movie files in the DB, but the media framework can only read movies from files (not data).

Core Data offers a handy feature called “external binary storage”, where the entity data is not stored in the DB, but in an external file. This is transparent to the Core Data API user. My question is, can I get the path to the external file, so that I could store a movie using Core Data and then easily load it from its Core Data external file?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you want to access the data directly (i.e., not through CoreData), you may be better off giving each file a UUID as name, and store that name in the database, and store the actual file yourself.

    If you use UIManagedDocument, you have several options. Using the above technique, you can store the files alongside the database, because UIManagedDocument is really a file package.

    Alternatively, you can subclass from UIManagedDocument and override the methods that handle reading/writing the “extra” files. This will give you access to the files themselves. You can hook there to do whatever you want, including grabbing the actual URL to the file CoreData automatically creates.

    - (id)additionalContentForURL:(NSURL *)absoluteURL error:(NSError **)error
- (BOOL)readAdditionalContentFromURL:(NSURL *)absoluteURL error:(NSError **)error
- (BOOL)writeAdditionalContent:(id)content toURL:(NSURL *)absoluteURL originalContentsURL:(NSURL *)absoluteOriginalContentsURL error:(NSError **)error
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