NSFetchedResultsController with sections created by first letter of a string

Question

Learning Core Data on the iPhone. There seem to be few examples on Core Data populating a table view with sections. The CoreDataBooks example uses sections, but they\'re ge

Answer 1

I encounter this issue all the time. The solution that seems best that i always come back to is to just give the entity a real first initial property. Being a real field provides for more efficient searching and ordering as you can set the field to indexed. It doesn't seem like it's too much work to pull the first initial out and populate a second field with it when the data is first imported / created. You have to write that initial parsing code either way, but you could do it once per entity and never again. The drawbacks seem to be you are storing one extra character per entity (and the indexing) really, that's likely insignificant.

One extra note. I shy away from modifying the generated entity code. Maybe i'm missing something, but the tools for generating CoreData entities do not respect any code i might have put in there. Either option i pick when generating the code removes any customizations i might have made. If i fill up my entities with clever little functions, then i need to add a bunch of properties to that entity, i can't regenerate it easily.