CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ioscore-datarelationship
DogCoffee
DogCoffee

Reputation: 19966

When not to use a Core Data relationship

I'm in process of re designing a prototype and I'm hit a roadblock. Using a relationship makes life easy - but should I use it in this case.

I'm leaning towards not using it. This is a simplified version of my problem.

VISIT (many) <<--> (one) CLIENT

Each visit can be with only 1 client, and a client can have many visits.

(another example would be a client <->> invoice relationship)

Say my client changes address, when I'm looking at my Visit entities and the associated client - I'll always have the up to date details.

If I didnt have a relationship, and just a variable like clientName within the visit object - well you would have to manually go through and update each object.

Problem:

If I use a relationship between the objects

The issue is deletion - if I want to keep my Visit objects with a valid client object then I cannot allow client deletion. But surely you should be able to delete a client - so I will include that feature in the app. But if I do delete the client - there goes my valid client info that was associated with the Visit.

So even though making a relationship seems to be the best thing to do initially - you should really have the associated info within the visit object... and thus scape the relationship ?

Thanks for any advice.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 49

Answers (1)

Rafał Sroka
Rafał Sroka

Reputation: 40028

You might go with a boolean flag archived. So instead of deleting the Client entity you would set archived to YES.

Upvotes: 3

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