NSEntityDescription

Entities are to managed objects what Class is to id, or—to use a database analogy—what tables are to rows. An instance specifies an entity’s name, its properties (its attributes and relationships, expressed by instances of NSAttributeDescription and NSRelationshipDescription) and the class by which it is represented.

An NSEntityDescription object is associated with a specific class whose instances are used to represent entries in a persistent store in applications using the Core Data Framework. Minimally, an entity description should have:

• A name

• The name of a managed object class

  (If an entity has no managed object class name, it defaults to NSManagedObject.)

You usually define entities in a Managed object modelusing the data modeling tool in Xcode. NSEntityDescription objects are primarily used by the Core Data Framework for mapping entries in the persistent store to managed objects in the application. You are not likely to interact with them directly unless you are specifically working with models. Like the other major modeling classes, NSEntityDescription provides you with a user dictionary in which you can store any application-specific information related to the entity.

Entity descriptions are editable until they are used by an object graph manager. This allows you to create or modify them dynamically. However, once a description is used (when the managed object model to which it belongs is associated with a persistent store coordinator), it must not (indeed cannot) be changed. This is enforced at runtime: any attempt to mutate a model or any of its sub-objects after the model is associated with a persistent store coordinator causes an exception to be thrown. If you need to modify a model that is in use, create a copy, modify the copy, and then discard the objects with the old model.

If you want to create an entity hierarchy, you need to consider the relevant API. You can only set an entity’s sub-entities (see subentities), you cannot set an entity’s super-entity directly. To set a super-entity for a given entity, you must therefore set an array of subentities on that super entity and include the current entity in that array. So, the entity hierarchy needs to be built top-down.

NSEntityDescription’s copy method returns an entity such that

[[entity copy] isEqual:entity] == NO

Since NSDictionary copies its keys and requires that keys both conform to the NSCopying protocol and have the property that copy returns an object for which [[object copy] isEqual:object] is true, you should not use entities as keys in a dictionary. Instead, you should either use the entity’s name as the key, or use a map table (NSMapTable) with retain callbacks.

NSEntityDescription supports the NSFastEnumeration protocol. You can use this to enumerate over an entity’s properties, as illustrated in the following example:

NSEntityDescription *anEntity = ...;
for (NSPropertyDescription *property in anEntity) {
    // property is each instance of NSPropertyDescription in anEntity in turn
}