EOF Wiki

Welcome

This is the Objective-C EOF Wiki. It started as the MulleEOF wiki but soon after setting it up, it seemed to be a good idea to make it a more general EOF Wiki. If you have an Objective-C EOF clone or are looking for one: this is the place to be.

This Wiki is wholly unconcerned about Java-EOF as available through WebObjects 5 from Apple.From now on all references to EOF will always mean Objective-C EOF and Java will be ignored.

If you are not that familiar with EOF and it's history, you can read a good historical overview on Wikipedia.

Because of Spambots, you will have to register and confirm your email address, before you can change anything.

Description

EOF is commonly referred to as a database abstraction layer. And it is also a toolkit of various components that can be used independently. Even if your application doesn't access a database, it can pay off to get familiar with EOF.

EOF traditionally has been separated in three frameworks

• EOControl the abstraction layer that provides the groundwork for the editing and persistance of objects
• EOInterface the GUI component, that ties AppKit to EOControl
• EOAccess for the concrete use of EOControl. It contains an EOObjectStore subclass, that uses one or multiple SQL databases for persistance

Here's a look at the classes contained in those frameworks:

Download the PDF to look at it in detail.

Articles

Articles about EOAccess

• Who is handling the restricted qualifier
• What cachesObjects on EOEntity can and can not do
• Storing NSDates and NSCalendarDates in a database

Articles about EOControl

• What problems can EOFault solve for you ?
• What is the entity concept in EOControl ?
• How to create a recursive EOQualifier.
• Why prefetching can be dangerous.

Articles about EOInterface

• How changes in EOEnterpriseObjects propagate to EOAssociations' subjectChanged details the control flow starting with [self willChange]
• Who retains who when a NIB is loaded
• MulleEOF and the NSRunLoop explains some of the nitty gritty behind the scenes stuff
• Creating a daterange search field
• EOOutlineViewAssociation

Some of these articles are not part of this Wiki and therefore also not part of the CC license.

Documentation

Documentation for EOF is available from Apple on the developer site.

• EOControl API Reference
• EOAccess API Reference
• EOInterface API Reference

• (Local) Known Bugs in the Apple Documentation

Also some of these links may be helpful, as EOF became a part of WebObjects at some point in history

• WebObjects 4.5
• WO Developers Guide
• WO API Reference
• Foundation API Reference
• Legacy Docs

Most of these links are not part of this Wiki and therefore also not part of the CC license.

Implementations

The original

• EOF 4.5.1 by Apple

and the clones and relatives of EOF

• AJRDatabase
• GDL1
• GDL2
• MulleEOF
• SOPE GDL1

It'd be good to have a feature comparison chart at some point in time.

Related Projects and other Resources

• BDControl qualifier and sort ordering
• MulleConnectInspector for Interface Builder 2.4
• EOF Mailinglist hosted by the Omnigroup extremely low traffic
• WikiBooks Programming:WebObjects a WebObjects Wiki for Java EOF/WebObjects