How to Save and Manage Data with Core Data in Swift - SwiftUI Basics Tutorial 2023

Are you struggling to find an efficient and easy way to save and manage user data in your Swift app? - In this tutorial, we’ll dive into the basics of Core Data, a powerful framework that allows you to save or cache data locally on the device. In a previous tutorial, I created a macOS/iOS task manager app and encountered challenges with filtering data streams. To overcome this, we’ll transform the project from using dummy data defined in code to utilizing Core Data. By following along with this tutorial, you’ll witness a direct comparison between using structs and Core Data, gaining valuable insights into the benefits of the latter. ⬇️ You can find project files here: https://github.com/gahntpo/CoreData Core Data enables data persistence and caching. It even offers tools for syncing data across multiple devices, making it ideal for cross-platform apps. Over the years, Core Data has evolved, adding features like undo and redo functionality. While Core Data has been around since iOS 3, it was primarily used with Objective-C. This historical context makes it slightly more challenging to work with in Swift. However, fear not! I’ll share some tricks to simplify the process. Although it requires initial setup, the effort is worthwhile. Once you’ve correctly defined your data models and written some helper code, building the UI in SwiftUI becomes a breeze. Core Data is the mediator between your app and the database, handling file storage, and retrieval. You won’t need to worry about file management or other cumbersome tasks; Core Data takes care of the heavy lifting. To define data types, we use the visual editor in the .xcdatamodeld file. Additionally, we need to configure our app to use Core Data and define the schema and model definitions. We can even choose between a SQLite database or a temporary one, which is handy when working with SwiftUI previews. This allows us to experiment with different data without persisting it permanently. 00:00 Introduction 01:41 What is Core Data 06:02 Sample Project 10:39 Defining the Model for Task 25:37 Adding Inititalizer 28:40 What is the Core Data Stack 31:15 How to setup your Xcode project with Core Data Container 35:01 Xcode Preview with Core Data 38:29 Deleting Core Data objects 40:56 Fetching Data with NSFetchRequest 46:21 Working on the Sidebar view to use Core Data 52:19 Changing the Task List View 58:45 How to use Relationships 1:08:25 Adding Subtasks 1:18:57 How to make Core Data changes animated in Swiftui 1:19:40 Saving changes permanently in Core Data 1:22:22 Wrap up If you liked what you learned and you want to see more, check out one of my courses! 👨‍💻 my SwiftUI course https://learn.swiftyplace.com/swiftui-layout-course 👨‍💻 my Core Data and SwiftUI course https://learn.swiftyplace.com/swiftui-core-data-mastery-course #coredata #swiftui #dataflow