I'm working on an iPhone app and need a little advice on modeling the Core Data schema. My idea is a utility that allows the user to speed-dial their contacts using user-created rules based on the time of day. In other words, I would tell the app that my wife is commuting from 6am to 7am, at work from 7am to 4pm, commuting from 4pm to 5pm, and home from 5pm to 6am, Monday through Friday. Then, when I tap her name in my app, it would select the number to dial based on the current day and time.
I have the user interface nearly complete (thanks in no small part to help I've received here), but now I've got some questions regarding the persistent store.
The user can select start- and stop-times in 5-minute increments. This means there are 2,016 possible "time slots" in week (7 days * 24 hours * 12 5-minute intervals per hour). I see a few options for setting this up.
Option #1: One array of time slots, with 2,016 entries. Each entry would be a dictionary containing a contact identifier and an associated phone number to dial. I think this means I'd need a "Contact" entity to store the contact information, and a "TimeSlot" entity for each of the 2,016 possible time slots.
Option #2: Each Contact has its own array of time slots, each with 2,016 entries. Each array entry would simply be a string indicating which phone number to dial.
Option #3: Each Contact has a dictionary of time slots. An entry would only be added to the dictionary for time slots with an active rule. If a search for, say, time slot 1,299 (Friday 12:15pm) didn't find a key @"1299" in the dictionary, then a default number would be dialed instead.
I'm not sure any of these is the "right" way or the "best" way. I'm not even sure I need to use Core Data to manage it; maybe just saving arrays would be simpler. Any input you can offer would be appreciated.
