Question

I have a NSManageObject set up as an Entity in Core Data. After fetching the Entity, I want to be able to pull all of the attributes and put them into an NSMutableArray to populate a UITableView with.

For Example:
Entity:
Project

Attributes: startDate(required); finishDate(optional); projectName(required); etc….

How do I get all of these into an NSMutableArray? Or is there a better way to populate the UITableView?

Answer 1

You can get this by asking the NSEntityDescription for its NSAttributeDescription objects:

NSManagedObject *object = ...;
NSEntityDescription *entity = [object entity];
NSDictionary *attributes = [entity attributesByName];

NSMutableArray *values = [NSMutableArray array];
for (NSString *attributeName in attributes) {
  id value = [object valueForKey:attributeName];
  if (value != nil) {
    [values addObject:value];
  }
}

Note: this only contains attributes, not relationships. If you want only relationship values, you can use -relationshipsByName. If you want both attributes and relationships, you can use -propertiesByName.

Deciding whether this is a good idea or not is left as an exercise to the reader.