Question

Right now I have an UITableViewController that displays a set of Artist objects sorted into sections (alphabetically) using NSFetchedResultsController. When you tap an artist in that list, a second UITableViewController is pushed and displays the artist.shows objects, also sorted into sections (by date).

Right now I’m sorting that second data source (artist.shows) “manually”, using NSSortDescriptor and a for() loop to determine where to have the table view sections (one section for every month).

Is that the right way to go? Would it make more sense to create a second NSFetchedResultsController to sort that data, although it would basically be fetching data I already have in artist.shows?

Answer 1

You should definitely use a second fetched results controller. It can share the managedObjectContext with the first, allowing to access the already faulted objects in that context.

You’ll want to structure your predicate / sort descriptor for the controller appropriately, such as:

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"artist.name == %@" argumentsArray:[NSArray arrayWithObject:selectedArtist.name]];

You could also scope it by the actual artist object but that should give you the idea.