Question

Say I have a custom NSManagedObject Department and this has a property representing a to-many relationship to employees i.e. NSSet *employees;.

For a given Department, I want to remove all objects in employees. What is the recommended/best way to do this, please?

So, hypothetically, my code would look like this:

Department.h

@interface Department: NSManagedObject {
}
@property (retain) NSString *departmentName;
@property (retain) NSSet *employees;
@end

Department.m

@implementation Department
@dynamic departmentName;
@dynamic employees;

Employee.h

@interface Employee: NSManagedObject {
}
@property (retain) NSString *firstName;
@property (retain) NSString *lastName;
@property (retain) Department *worksIn;
@end

doCoreDataStuff

- (void)doCoreDataStuff:sender {
    //add a department, give it a couple employees, then try to remove those employees
    NSEntityDescription *deptEntity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Department"
                                                 inManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext];
    Department *dept = [Department alloc] initWithEntity:deptEntity
                          insertIntoManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext];
    NSError *error;

    dept.departmentName = @"Accounting";
    //save more often than normal to see more easily what causes error
    if (![self.managedObjectContext save:&error]) NSLog(@"\nError: %@", [error localizedDescription]);

    NSEntityDescription *empEntity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Employee"
                                                 inManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext];
    emp.firstName = @"Steve";
    emp.lastName = @"Smith";
    emp.worksIn = dept;

    if (![self.managedObjectContext save:&error]) NSLog(@"\nError: %@", [error localizedDescription]);

    emp = [[Employee alloc] initWithEntity:empEntity
            insertIntoManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext];
    emp.firstName = @"Natasha";
    emp.lastName = @"Johnson";
    emp.worksIn = dept;

    if (![self.managedObjectContext save:&error]) NSLog(@"\nError: %@", [error localizedDescription]);

    //all good so far! now will try to delete all employees for this department
    dept.employees = [NSSet set];
    if (![self.managedObjectContext save:&error]) NSLog(@"\nError: %@", [error localizedDescription]); //"Multiple validation errors occurred."

    //this also produces the same error
    [[dept mutableSetValueForKey:@"employees"] removeAllObjects];
    if (![self.managedObjectContext save:&error]) NSLog(@"\nError: %@", [error localizedDescription]); //"Multiple validation errors occurred."

The relationship employees is not optional so I’m guessing that removing employees from the department means that I am trying to “orphan” the employees i.e. keep employees in the persisted model without an associated department.

So, I think my original question should be reworded to: what is best/recommended way to remove all “child” objects of a “parent” when the children have a non-optional relationship with the parent?

I suspect that the answer is going to be “loop through and delete the employee objects one at a time”.

UPDATE

According to an answer and a link to Apple’s documentation, I should be able to set the delete rule to “Cascade” and then code like department.employees = [NSSet set]; will work. However, this does not work in my very simple project where I have set the delete rule accordingly.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you want to delete the employee elements for a specific department, then you could run a for-in loop like for

for (Employees * theEmployee in department.employees) {
  [self.managedObjectContext deleteObject:[self.managedObjectContext objectWithID:theEmployee.objectID]]; 
}

Then save your managed context. IF of course that’s what you want, and not remove the relationship between employees and departement; in that case, assigning an empty set would work.

Variation on above:

for (Employee *employeeToDelete in department.employees) {
    [self.managedObjectContext deleteObject:employeeToDelete];
}