In my usage of CloudKit I had to determine early on how I was going to upload batches of records and deal with batches coming down. I’m dealing entirely with CKRecord instances, so all of my entities will need to know how to handle those; both in how to create one from themselves, and how to turn turn one into itself.

I didn’t have any clever idea at first, so I punted. For saving records to CloudKit, I’m monitoring the NSManagedObjectContextDidSaveNotification (which isn’t verbose enough) and I get NSSets of managed objects. Here’s what my initial implementation looked like:

- (CKRecord *)ckRecordForManagedObject:(NSManagedObject *)managedObject
{
    CKRecordZoneID *userZone = [[SBSyncController sharedSyncController] userRecordZone];
    CKRecord *recordToReturn;

    if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBPerson class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBPerson *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBGame class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBGame *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBMatch class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBMatch *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBPlayer class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBPlayer *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBScore class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBScore *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBMatchImage class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBMatchImage *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    } else if ([managedObject isKindOfClass:[SBMatchLocation class]]) {
        recordToReturn = [(SBMatchLocation *)managedObject cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:userZone];
    }

    return recordToReturn;
}

Yuck.

And similarly, I captured the -recordType property of an incoming CKRecord, then ran -isEqualToString: against it to determine which entity it represented. And then something interesting happened.

I got to the place where I was working through how to handle conflicts and needed a -modificationTimestamp property to get that done, and realized that I could use a protocol to declare uniform conformance across all of my entities. I could make sure that the class conforms to the protocol, and then set the property without having to do the ugliness of something like the above snippet.

And thus, SBCloudKitCompatible was born. This protocol defines 4 things in the interface:

@protocol SBCloudKitCompatible <NSObject>
@property (nonatomic, strong) NSString *ckRecordName;
@property (nonatomic, strong) NSDate *modificationDate;

- (CKRecord *)cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:(CKRecordZoneID *)zone;
+ (NSManagedObject *)managedObjectFromRecord:(CKRecord *)record context:(NSManagedObjectContext *)context;
@end

By conforming to this protocol, I’ve been able to cut out a bunch of code. Here’s what the snippet above now looks like:

- (CKRecord *)ckRecordForManagedObject:(NSManagedObject *)managedObject
{
    CKRecord *recordToReturn = nil;

    if ([managedObject conformsToProtocol:@protocol(SBCloudKitCompatible)]) {
        id<SBCloudKitCompatible> object = (id<SBCloudKitCompatible>)managedObject;
        recordToReturn = [object cloudKitRecordInRecordZone:self.zoneID];
    }

    return recordToReturn;
}

I think we can agree that it looks way, way better.