How to manage the data to fill a Core Data database with a lot of data (Edit: changed title)

I hope all of you have had a good Christmas :-)

In my app i have a database, using Core Data, that requires a lot of data, at least 1.500 records consisting of 6 fields. That means at least 9.000 lines of data. All data is pure text.

During the development phase i have 250 records to test on.

The way i do populate the DB at this point is that i have a text (.txt) file, which i edit in Word and then reads into my database. This is very inconvenient for many reasons such as if i save it, by mistake, in the wrong format it all开发者_StackOverflow中文版 screws up (i have Swedish characters that changes).

Given the amount of records i will need i would like to ask for advice how people do these things and what to use? Is there some sort of (free) database available that i could use etc.

Cheers

For editing use notepad, notepad++, or gedit. You won't have issues with MS Word specific characters.

I am not too familiar with Core Data, but I believe it uses SQlite on the backend.

I have implemented SQLite directly into a few developments that I have worked on. It might be worth your time to take a look.

Can you give more details about your app? Platform, how often data is accessed, how often it is modified, etc.

Hmm, one way to get started on this might be to fill the Core Data store a single time, and then, whenever you need to run your tests, just copy this store file out of your application bundle into your documents directory. I maintain a "Reset All" function in a game I've worked on using this method, and it works great for very quickly populating Core Data.

Hej,

currently I am developing an app with very similar requirements - a prepopulated Core Data database with 1200+ entries with more or less the same amount of fields.

The data I receive is in xml format. I've written a small mac app which features the same core data model as the iphone app does - it will read the xml and create core data entries accordingly. I then take the database file my mac app created and add it to my iphone apps bundle, from where it will be copied to the documents folder on the first launch (or whenever a reset to the factory data is required).

This is working perfectly, I think you could do something very similar. The only difference would be that, instead of parsing xml, you'd need to write something that reads your textfile. Fear not, it's easy to do!

I've taken the approach to add a unit test that determines if the database exists. If the database doesn't exist, the test creates it from a text file (usually a plist or csv).

This approach enables me to: alter the underlying data via text, "clean" the database by simply deleting it, and run tests against the data. Since you're using CoreData, there might be some additional benefits by ensuring your schema matches the dataset; I once found I'd accidentally set an attribute to not allow nil.