As I was developing Speech Timer 2, initially I used a document class to manage my Core Data stack – that is,
UIManagedDocument
on iOS and BSManagedDocument
on OS X. Those two gets derived into one subclass and a preprocessor statement selects the right superclass at compile time. The reason for using those were primarily convenience: they both manage a Core Data stack and have similar APIs so that I can use one class to inherit from both of them with only minimal variations on the two platforms. Another reason was window management on the Mac – NSDocument
has some fancy way to manage windows and NSWindowController
objects already has a reference to its document – so that I don’t need to manage yet another reference to the core data stack, namely NSManagedObjectContext
instance.
Things were nice until I tried adding in iCloud support. As of this writing, BSManagedDocument
isn’t yet tested to incrementally sync a Core Data based document over iCloud. I’ve had some success in adding support for iCloud there but then hit a brick wall: first save of a document often fails with a "The file couldn’t be saved because you don’t have permission.
” error. I was baffled.
This iCloud thing have been delaying the project for quite some time and I’ll need to fix it rather quick. Since I’m essentially re-implementing UIManagedDocument
on the Mac, there may be some other things that the original class does that I need to emulate to get the two to sync. Stuff that I haven’t got much time to do.
Then I realized: Speech Timer is a library-style app. There is only one document, ever and the user doesn’t need to be presented with open/save dialogs and all the standard things that a document-based app do. The whole convenience of NSDocument
s window management on the Mac is negated by the additional efforts I need to make. So I decided to rip out that document-based implementation and take the best bits of BSManagedDocument
and bring it to both iOS and OS X.
Introducing BSCoreDataController
: your Core Data stack manager for iOS and OS X. It’s loosely inspired by UIManagedDocument
but pared down to its bare necessities for supporting a library-style app. Additionally there are a number of convenience functions to make iCloud easier to use by a Core Data app.
Like UIManagedDocument
& BSManagedDocument
classes that came before it, the class features:
- Dual nested managed object contexts for maximum responsiveness of your application due to non-blocking I/O.
- Saves the data inside a file package, which is important in 10.9 and iOS 7 since by default the Core Data store file now consists of more than one file due to SQLite write-ahead logging mode that was made default in those OS releases.
- Support for iCloud’s persistent store changes.
- Support for Autosave.
However it doesn’t have the document baggages that a library-style app doesn’t use:
- No support for Save As, Duplicate, Save To, and the things that you’ll need to do if you expose document management functionality to the user.
- Designed to be served from your
Application Support
folder and not from yourDocuments
directory.
So I’ve posted its preliminary version on github: adib/BSCoreDataController – freshly forked out of Speech Timer 2’s main project. Enjoy!
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