How do I query/filter a to-many relationship in Core Data

Question

I have Customer, Event and Address objects in my data model. Both Customer and Address have a one-to-many relationship to Event.

I can get the distinct list of addresses for a customer's events for by doing this:

NSSet *addressSet = [customer valueForKeyPath:@"events.address"];

For the part of the UI I'm working on now, I need to display the address from the most recent event prior to now that has an address.

I'm starting to go down the path of creating a NSFetchRequest, setting it's entity, sort descriptors, predicate and then looping through the results, but it seems like a lot of code. Am I missing some obvious way of filtering/sorting on the "events" relationship of the Customer object or is creating the NSFetchRequest the best solution?

Answer 1

This is actually pretty simple because of the KVO and KVC accessors that are available on NSSet and NSArray.

NSSet *eventsWithAddress = [[customer valueForKey:@"events"] filteredSetWithPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"address != nil"]];
id mostRecentEvent = [eventsWithAddress valueForKeyPath:@"@max.lastDate"];

Of course the property name is up to you since I cannot see your data model but that gives you a general idea of where the code needs to go. You can see what operators are available in Apple's documentation.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/KeyValueCoding/Concepts/ArrayOperators.html

WARNING: Code written in StackOverflow comment window so you will most likely need to tweak it a bit.