Conclusion

So, where does this leave us? What are good use cases for this? Obviously, if you're working a lot of NSManagedObject's, this will considerably slow down your code base. Also if you only have one or two structs, it is easier, more performant, and less magical if you simply write a serialization technique yourself with the domain knowledge of your individual struct.

Rather, the reflection technique showcased here can be used if you have many, complicated structs, and you'd like to store some of those sometimes.

Examples would be:

• Setting Favorites
• Storing Bookmarks
• Staring Items
• Keeping the last selection
• Storing the ast open item across restarts
• Temporary storage of items during specific processes.

Apart from that, of course, you can also use reflection for other use cases:

• Iterate over tuples
• Analyze classes
• Runtime analysis of object conformance
• Converting to / from JSON (or other types)
• Generated detailed logging / debugging information automatically (i.e. for externally generated objects)

More Information

The source documentation of the Reflection API is very detailed. I'd encourage everyone to have a look at that as well.

Also, there's a much more exhaustive implementation of the techniques showcased here in the CoreValue project on GitHub which allows you to easily encode and decode from / to Structs to CoreData.