Question

I have objects with location data stored in Core Data, I would like to be able to fetch and display just the nearest point to the current location. I’m aware there are formulas which will calculate the distance from current lat/long to a stored lat/long, but I’m curious about the best way to perform this for a set of 1000+ points stored in Core Data. I know I could just return the points from Core Data to an array and then loop through that looking for the min value for distance between the points but I’d imagine there’s a more efficient method, possibly leveraging Core Data in some way.

Any insight would be appreciated.

EDIT:
I don’t know how I missed this on my initial search but this SO question suggests just iterating through an array of Core Data objects but limiting the array size with a bounding box based on the current location. Is this the best I can do?

Answer 1

From what I can gather, it looks as though the best approach in this case is to return an array of points using a bounding box around the current location.

You can retrieve points within a certain range of the current location, if the returned array is empty, then increase the size of the box. Once some results come back, calculate the nearest in the array and use that point.