Question

I’m working on an app that uses Core Data and a UITableView. What I’ve noticed is that when I add a new TableView entry, the cells seem to order alphabetically. Is there a way to make it so the cells are ordered by the time I add them (from top to bottom) rather than by the alphabet. Thanks!

Answer 1

You should add a timestamp field for your core data entity (type NSDate). Then, you can use a simple sort descriptor on your fetch request to sort the entities as appropriate.

For example, after you create the entity…

NSDate *now = [NSDate date];
[myNewEntity setValue:now forKey:@"timestamp"];

and then, in your fetch request…

NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [NSFetchRequest fetchRequestWithEntityName:@"MyEntity"];
NSSortDescriptor *sortByTimestamp = [NSSortDescriptor sortDescriptorWithKey:@"timestamp" ascending:YES];
fetchRequest.sortDescriptors = [NSArray arrayWithObject:sortByTimestamp];