I wonder in which cases it would be good to make an NSManagedObjectModel completely programmatically, with NSEntityDescription instances and all this stuff.
I’m that kind of person who prefers to code programmatically, rejecting Interface Builder. But when it comes to Core Data, I have a hard time figuring out why I should kill my time NOT using the nice Xcode Data Modeler tool.
And since data models are stuck to a given state (except when you want to do some ugly migration operations where thinks probably go wrong and users get mad, really mad), I see no big sense in a data model that’s made programmatically for the purpose of changing it all the time.
Did I miss something?
I dont think you missed anything. The only reason I can see to create your model programatically would be if the objects you are modeling are themselves dynamic: you could for instance build a coredata entity (or graph of entities) in response to a web service which changed over time, or was selected by the user. However, I think if you had that or a similar use case, you wouldn’t need to write this question (and you’d probably solve it a different way anyway)