iPhone and Core Data: how to retain user-entered data between updates?
- by Shaggy Frog
Consider an iPhone application that is a catalogue of animals. The application should allow the user to add custom information for each animal -- let's say a rating (on a scale of 1 to 5), as well as some notes they can enter in about the animal. However, the user won't be able to modify the animal data itself. Assume that when the application gets updated, it should be easy for the (static) catalogue part to change, but we'd like the (dynamic) custom user information part to be retained between updates, so the user doesn't lose any of their custom information.
We'd probably want to use Core Data to build this app. Let's also say that we have a previous process already in place to read in animal data to pre-populate the backing (SQLite) store that Core Data uses. We can embed this database file into the application bundle itself, since it doesn't get modified. When a user downloads an update to the application, the new version will include the latest (static) animal catalogue database, so we don't ever have to worry about it being out of date.
But, now the tricky part: how do we store the (dynamic) user custom data in a sound manner?
My first thought is that the (dynamic) database should be stored in the Documents directory for the app, so application updates don't clobber the existing data. Am I correct?
My second thought is that since the (dynamic) user custom data database is not in the same store as the (static) animal catalogue, we can't naively make a relationship between the Rating and the Notes entities (in one database) and the Animal entity (in the other database). In this case, I would imagine one solution would be to have an "animalName" string property in the Rating/Notes entity, and match it up at runtime. Is this the best way to do it, or is there a way to "sync" two different databases in Core Data?
