Question

I’m a nwebie in Core Data, i have designed a navigation based application and some of the data i use are created on run time(come from a URL via JSON). I took a few tutorials an searched for almost a day but haven’t still realized how to save the incoming JSON data to the Entity (or event?) in my Core Data model. I fetch the data in the DetailViewController class and i need to save this data to Core Data(I have prepared an Entity with 7 properties). Can anyone please help?(If you know a good tutorial or sample code i will be pleased)

EDIT This may be a little specific but i really have trouble with and need just a little help.
My data comes to the app from a kind of restful server(i wrote it in PHP), firstly user enters his/her login informations(which i have saved to the database on server before) and when the response data comes i will use different elements of it in differen views(for example the user_id will be used on a view and the buttonData etc on other views). My question is, how will i save JSON data into my core data model(has tree Entities for the moment). Thanks in advance

Note: I lokked arround a lot but couldn’t find any answer&tutorial about an app like mine

Answer 1

The best way to do that would be to create entities corresponding to JSON structure. Easiest was is when each JSON object becomes an entity, and arrays become arrays of entities. Be reasonable, however, and don’t introduce too much overkill for JSON subobjects that are essentially part of its superobject.

When you have created entities, you can start off with the parsing and translation. Use some JSON framework (starting from iOS5 there’s one from Apple) and parse JSON string into object tree, where root item is either an NSArray or NSDictionary, and subelements will be NSArray, NSDictionary, NSNumber, NSString or NSNull.

Go over them one by one in iterational loops and assign according values to your core data entity attributes. You can make use of NSKeyValueCoding here and avoid too much manual mapping of the attribute names. If your JSON attributes are of the same name as entity attributes, you’ll be able to just go over all dictionary elements and parse them into attributes of the same name.

Example

My parsing code in the similar situation was as follows:

NSDictionary *parsedFeed = /* your way to get a dictionary */;
for (NSString *key in parsedFeed) {
    id value = [parsedFeed objectForKey:key];
    // Don't assign NSNull, it will break assignments to NSString, etc.
    if (value && [value isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]])
         value = nil;

    @try {
        [yourCreatedEntity setValue:value forKey:property];
    } @catch (NSException *exception) {
        // Exception means such attribute is not defined in the class or some other error.
    }
}

This code will work in trivial situation, however, it may need to be expanded, depending on your needs:

• With some kinds of custom mappings in case you want your JSON value be placed in differently named attribute.
• If your JSON has sub-objects or arrays of sub-objects, you will need to detect those cases, for example in setters, and initiate new parsing one level deeper. Otherwise with my example you will face the situation that assigns NSDictionary object to an NSManagedObject.

I don’t think it is reasonable to dive into these, more advanced matters in scope of this answer, as it will expand it too much.