Overview of the Tutorial

This tutorial takes you through the steps of building a very basic Core Data–based command-line utility. The goal is to illustrate the creation of a Core Data application entirely in code, including all aspects of the Core Data stack, instantiation of managed objects, and fetching—all without the distraction of a user interface. It even shows the creation of a managed object model in code.

Task Goal

The task goal of this tutorial is to create a low-level Core Data–based utility. It simply records the date on which the utility is run, records its process ID, and prints the run history to the output. The utility uses a single entity, Run. The Run entity is very simple; it has only two attributes, the process ID and the date on which the process was run.

Note that the emphasis in this tutorial is on illustrating low-level functionality in Core Data, not on compactness, maintainability, or user friendliness. Although some explanation is given of what happens behind the scenes, it does not give an in-depth analysis of the Core Data infrastructure.

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