Implementing Tagging using Core Data on the iPhone
- by Jonathan Penn
I have an application that uses CoreData and I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement tagging and filtering by tag. For my purposes, if I was doing this in raw SQLite I would only need three tables, tags, item_tags and of course my items table. Then filtering would be as simple as joining between the three tables where only items are related to the given tags. Quite straightforward.
But, is there a way to do this in CoreData and utilizing NSFetchedResultsController? It doesn't seem that NSPredicate give you the ability to filter through joins. NSPredicate's aren't full SQL anyway so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree there. I'm trying to avoid reimplementing my app using SQLite without CoreData since I'm enjoying the performance CoreData gives me in other areas. Yes, I did consider (and built a test implementation) diving into the raw SQLite that CoreData generates, but that's not future proof and I want to avoid that, too.
Has anyone else tried to tackle tagging/filtering with CoreData in a UITableView with NSFetchedResultsController
