How can I duplicate, or copy a Core Data Managed Object?

Question

I have a managed object ("A") that contains various attributes and types of relationships, and its relationships also have their own attributes & relationships. What I would like to do is to "copy" or "duplicate" the entire object graph rooted at object "A", and thus creating a new object "B" that is very similar to "A".

To be more specific, none of the relationships contained by "B" (or its children) should point to objects related to "A". There should be an entirely new object graph with similar relationships intact, and all objects having the same attributes, but of course different id's.

There is the obvious manual way to do this, but I was hoping to learn of a simpler means of doing so which was not totally apparent from the Core Data documentation.

TIA!

Answer 1

Here's a class I created to perform a "deep copy" of managed objects: attributes and relationships. Note that this does not check against loops in the object graph. (Thanks Jaanus for the starting off point...)

@interface ManagedObjectCloner : NSObject {
}
+(NSManagedObject *)clone:(NSManagedObject *)source inContext:(NSManagedObjectContext *)context;
@end

@implementation ManagedObjectCloner

+(NSManagedObject *) clone:(NSManagedObject *)source inContext:(NSManagedObjectContext *)context{
    NSString *entityName = [[source entity] name];

    //create new object in data store
    NSManagedObject *cloned = [NSEntityDescription
                               insertNewObjectForEntityForName:entityName
                               inManagedObjectContext:context];

    //loop through all attributes and assign then to the clone
    NSDictionary *attributes = [[NSEntityDescription
                                 entityForName:entityName
                                 inManagedObjectContext:context] attributesByName];

    for (NSString *attr in attributes) {
        [cloned setValue:[source valueForKey:attr] forKey:attr];
    }

    //Loop through all relationships, and clone them.
    NSDictionary *relationships = [[NSEntityDescription
                                   entityForName:entityName
                                   inManagedObjectContext:context] relationshipsByName];
    for (NSRelationshipDescription *rel in relationships){
        NSString *keyName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",rel];
        //get a set of all objects in the relationship
        NSMutableSet *sourceSet = [source mutableSetValueForKey:keyName];
        NSMutableSet *clonedSet = [cloned mutableSetValueForKey:keyName];
        NSEnumerator *e = [sourceSet objectEnumerator];
        NSManagedObject *relatedObject;
        while ( relatedObject = [e nextObject]){
            //Clone it, and add clone to set
            NSManagedObject *clonedRelatedObject = [ManagedObjectCloner clone:relatedObject 
                                                          inContext:context];
            [clonedSet addObject:clonedRelatedObject];
        }

    }

    return cloned;
}


@end