Question

I’ve got a table using NSFetchedResultsController to automatically populate and update the table view. The data used to populate that table comes from an external server (XML call) and only represents a subset of what is actually on the server.

The problem: I want to have a Search bar above this table but instead of searching the app data (only a small subset) I want to search on the Server and then use this table to return the results.

NSFetchedResults is designed for searching only the CoreData on the app, not a remote server. How would I integrate an external server search and display those results? I don’t want to have to go to another ViewController just for search.

Answer 1

I don’t think it’s possible to use NSFetchedResultsController for this, because you don’t have a NSFetchRequest to associate.

But what you can do is to put some logic in table view delegate methods, when you are searching you can then populate an NSArray and provide it as datasource to the table, then you can reload the itself.

// call to server
NSArray *remoteDatasource = <<populate from call>>;
AppSearchMode searchMode = AppSearchModeRemote; // this is an enum you could declare in .h

Then you can reload table and all your delegates one are being called again.

// table view related
- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView {
    switch(searchMode) {
       case AppSearchModeCoreData:
         return [[self fetchedResultsController] sections] count];
       case AppSearchModeRemote:
         return [remoteDatasource count];
    }
}

I hope I made it clear, I did something similar time ago.