I have been pretty quiet lately, mostly for 2 reasons:
- I’ve been busy with betRway.com
- I’ve been playing a lot with the iPhone SDK.
I didn’t know anything about Objective-C so it is a challenging experience to go back to the C world, but I’m starting to find it very exciting. After I had read Cocoa Fundamentals and the iPhone Application Programming Guide (very boring stuff, but hardly avoidable), after having gone through “Your First iPhone Application“, I found myself pretty frustrated because I missed a lot of knowledge to jump into sample projects.
Fortunately, I stumbled upon this great blog with plenty of very complete and up-to-date tutorials. There is this especially this TodoList example that taught me how to do most of the things I couldn’t figure out by myself just by reading the code of the Books sample.
But at the end of that tutorial, I realized that a very important part of my code was made of boilerplate and ugly ANSI-C code to setup database stuff, like in the old days of JDBC. Google was my best friend and allowed me to find SQLitePersistentObjects. And boy it works great! And it makes the code so simpler. Make your own mind:
This used to be the application launching code:
[sourcecode language=’c’]
– (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {
[self createEditableCopyOfDatabaseIfNeeded];
[self initializeDatabase];
// Configure and show the window
[window addSubview:[navigationController view]];
[window makeKeyAndVisible];
}
// Creates a writable copy of the bundled default database in the application Documents directory.
– (void)createEditableCopyOfDatabaseIfNeeded {
// First, test for existence.
BOOL success;
NSFileManager *fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager];
NSError *error;
NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *writableDBPath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@”todo.sqlite”];
success = [fileManager fileExistsAtPath:writableDBPath];
if (success) return;
// The writable database does not exist, so copy the default to the appropriate location.
NSString *defaultDBPath = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@”todo.sqlite”];
success = [fileManager copyItemAtPath:defaultDBPath toPath:writableDBPath error:&error];
if (!success) {
NSAssert1(0, @”Failed to create writable database file with message ‘%@’.”, [error localizedDescription]);
}
}
// Open the database connection and retrieve minimal information for all objects.
– (void)initializeDatabase {
NSMutableArray *todoArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
self.todos = todoArray;
[todoArray release];
// The database is stored in the application bundle.
NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *path = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@”todo.sqlite”];
// Open the database. The database was prepared outside the application.
if (sqlite3_open([path UTF8String], &database) == SQLITE_OK) {
// Get the primary key for all books.
const char *sql = “SELECT pk FROM todo”;
sqlite3_stmt *statement;
// Preparing a statement compiles the SQL query into a byte-code program in the SQLite library.
// The third parameter is either the length of the SQL string or -1 to read up to the first null terminator.
if (sqlite3_prepare_v2(database, sql, -1, &statement, NULL) == SQLITE_OK) {
// We “step” through the results – once for each row.
while (sqlite3_step(statement) == SQLITE_ROW) {
// The second parameter indicates the column index into the result set.
int primaryKey = sqlite3_column_int(statement, 0);
// We avoid the alloc-init-autorelease pattern here because we are in a tight loop and
// autorelease is slightly more expensive than release. This design choice has nothing to do with
// actual memory management – at the end of this block of code, all the book objects allocated
// here will be in memory regardless of whether we use autorelease or release, because they are
// retained by the books array.
Todo *td = [[Todo alloc] initWithPrimaryKey:primaryKey database:database];
[todos addObject:td];
[td release];
}
}
// “Finalize” the statement – releases the resources associated with the statement.
sqlite3_finalize(statement);
} else {
// Even though the open failed, call close to properly clean up resources.
sqlite3_close(database);
NSAssert1(0, @”Failed to open database with message ‘%s’.”, sqlite3_errmsg(database));
// Additional error handling, as appropriate…
}
}
[/sourcecode]
Now it’s just that:
[sourcecode language=’c’]
– (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {
NSMutableArray *todoArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
self.todos = todoArray;
[todoArray release];
[self.todos addObjectsFromArray:[Todo allObjects]];
// Configure and show the window
[window addSubview:[navigationController view]];
[window makeKeyAndVisible];
}
[/sourcecode]
And this is just one example. All the CRUD operations are so much simpler. And I didn’t even need to create the SQLite database. It’s almost a shame Apple didn’t include such a framework in the SDK. For your curiosity, you can download the project here.
I love it! Now I should be able to get my hands dirty with my real project. More on that later ;o)
