I have a CoreData entity X, and controllers for this entity, XController. Now there's another entity, XGroup, containing a collection of X entities, and a XGroupController. Now the problem is that XGroupController needs to interact with XController, and it would be nice to just pass XGroupController a XGroup to observe, and then get the XControllers from the X entities. So the question is: is it a good idea to store a (weak, to avoid retain cycles) reference to a controller in an entity? It just feels a bit "wrong". Is there another design pattern for this?