A developer friendly Object Relational Model for SQLite3, wrapped over SQLite.swift

struct Person: SQLiteModel {

    // Required by SQLiteModel protocol
    var localID: SQLiteModelID = -1

    static let Name = Expression<String>("name")
    static let Age = Expression<Int>("age")
    static let BFF = Relationship<Person?>("best_friend")

    // Required by SQLiteModel protocol
    static func buildTable(tableBuilder: TableBuilder) {
        tableBuilder.column(Name)
        tableBuilder.column(Age, defaultValue: 0)
        tableBuilder.relationship(BFF, mappedFrom: self)
    }
}

let jack = try Person.new([
       Person.Age <- 10,
       Person.Name <- "Jack"
   ])

let jill = try Person.new([
   Person.Age <- 12,
   Person.Name <- "Jill"
   ])

// Set age
// same as jack.set(Person.Age, 11)
jack <| Person.Age |> 11
// Get age
// same as jack.get(Person.Age)
let age = jack => Person.Age

// Set Best Friend
// same as jack.set(Person.BFF, jill)
jack <| Person.BFF |> jill

let people = try Person.fetchAll()

Features

• Easy set up 👌
• Database functionality 💾 (Create / Drop Table, Insert, Update, Delete, Fetch)
• Relationships 👫 (One to One, Many to One, Many to Many)
• Schema alterations 🛠
• Sync and Async execution 🏁🚀
• Thread safety 👮☢️
• Easy to read and write syntax 🙌
• Verbose error handling and logging ❗️🖨
• Thoroughly documented 🤓🗂
• Well tested 📉📊📈
• iOS, OSX, tvOS support 📱💻📺
• Example projects🔍
• Pure Swift 💞😻

Installation

SQLiteModel requires Swift 2 (and Xcode 7) or greater.

Manual

To install SQLite.swift as an Xcode sub-project:

1. Drag the SQLite.xcodeproj file into your own project. (Submodule, clone, or download the project first.)

2. In your target’s General tab, click the + button under Linked Frameworks and Libraries.

3. Select the appropriate SQLite.framework for your platform.

4. Add.

Documentation

The wiki for this repo contains extensive documentation.

Why SQLiteModel

ORM’s

There are a lot of good data storage solutions out there, Realm and CoreData being the most popular. The biggest issue with these solutions is that they force your models be reference types (classes) instead of value types (structs).

Apple’s documentation lists a couple conditions where if true, a struct is probably a better choice than a class here. The following condition is especially relevant:

The structure’s primary purpose is to encapsulate a few relatively simple data values.

Sounds like a database row fits that description. Ideally if one are trying to model a database row, one should use structs, which SQLiteModel supports.

That being said, structs arent always the answer. SQLiteModel also supports using classes, but as of now they have to be final.

SQLite Wrappers

There are also a lot of wrappers over SQLite that exist, but aren’t object relational models. SQLite.swift and FMDB are 2 great libraries that serve this functionality. These are very powerful and flexible, but they take a while to set up the right way as they require a lot of boilerplate code.

With SQLiteModel, the boilerplate code is already written. Obviously you are sacrificing flexibility for ease of use, but for most data storage needs this is acceptable (IMO).

TL;DR

• SQLiteModel supports structs which are probably better than classes for modeling database tables and rows.
• SQLiteModel provides extensive functionality with minimum boilerplate code.

Example Projects

There a couple good examples of how to use SQLiteModel

Playground

Included in this repo is a playground that you can use to fool around with the syntax and features of SQLiteModel. Make sure you open SQLiteModel.xcodeproject since this playgrounf imports the SQLiteModel framework, and make sure you are using the SQLiteModel-iOS scheme.

Example Applications

There is a repo with example applications for iOS, TVOS, AND OSX that can be found here. These projects all use CocoaPods, so make sure to open the .xcworkspace to get them running.

The iOS example that is provided is the best and most thorough example of how to use SQLiteModel. The app is a blog platform that allows users create, delete, and save blog posts. Users can also add images to blogs using relationships, and view all images on another tab.

Moving Forward

• [x] Carthage support
• [x] Complex relationship queries
  
• [x] Reading in pre-existing databases
  
• [ ] More scalar queries
  
• [ ] More table alteration options
  
• [ ] Improved data pipeline between db and value types
• [ ] Performance improvements for relationships

Contact Info

Feel free to email me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or see examples where this has been used.

You can also hit me up on twitter @JeffHurray.

Contributing

If you want to add functionality please open an issue and/or create a pull request.

Shoutout

Big thank you to Stephen Celis for writing SQLite.swift which (IMHO) is one of the best Swift open source libraries that exists today.

License

SQLiteModel is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.