Core Data
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
3.2.0
|
| Operating system | macOS, iOS |
| Type | System Utility |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Apple Developer Core Data Programming Guide |
Core Data is an object graph and persistence framework provided by Apple in the macOS and iOS operating systems. It was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and iOS with iPhone SDK 3.0. It allows data organised by the relational entity–attribute model to be serialized into XML, binary, or SQLite stores. The data can be manipulated using higher level objects representing entities and their relationships. Core Data manages the serialised version, providing object lifecycle and object graph management, including persistence. Core Data interfaces directly with SQLite, insulating the developer from the underlying SQL.
Just as Cocoa Bindings handle many of the duties of the controller in a model–view–controller design, Core Data handles many of the duties of the data model. Among other tasks, it handles change management, serializing to disk, memory footprint minimization and queries against the data.
Core Data describes data with a high level data model expressed in terms of entities and their relationships plus fetch requests that retrieve entities meeting specific criteria. Code can retrieve and manipulate this data on a purely object level without having to worry about the details of storage and retrieval. The controller objects available in Interface Builder can retrieve and manipulate these entities directly. When combined with Cocoa bindings the UI can display many components of the data model without needing background code.
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