Question

Ok so I am pretty new to Core Data, and I am now starting to dig into it more and I have a question about the correct way to implement it.

I have a parentViewController object that is loaded from the appDelegate. The parentView is a view that sets up a paging UIScrollView for three more viewController objects, it’s children. The view loads up and I can page between the three views beautifully.

All three of the views need to have a significant amount of data exchange with Core Data. Should I pass the reference of the managedObjectContext into each different view within the parentView so that all the views can pull from and write to Core Data themselves? Or should I keep the reference in the parentView, and let the children pass the requests to the parent to handle?

Thanks

Answer 1

I have typically used a third option, at least for simple applications with a single persistence store that I access throughout the lifetime of the app: Make the managedObjectContext a property of your application delegate, and initialize it when the application is started. Then, you can access it from anywhere in your application using something like:

MyApplicationDelegate *delegate = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
NSManagedObjectContext *moc = [delegate managedObjectContext];

This approach is not ideal for all designs and architectures, but I’m finding it works well for me and keeps my code relatively clean.