EOEditingContext is a subclass of EOObjectStore that manages collections of objects in memory, tracking inserts, deletes, and updates, and propagating changes to the persistent store as needed. You can get the EOEditingContext that contains an object by sending the object an editingContext message. Object and Class Metadata Access One of the larger groups of methods in the EOEnterpriseObject interface provides information about an object's properties. Most of these methods consult an EOClassDescription to provide their answers. See the EOClassDescription class specification for the methods it implements.
Some methods return information about relationships.
The key-value coding methods define a general mechanism for accessing an object's properties, but you first have to know what those properties are. Sometimes, however, the Framework needs to preserve an object's entire state for later use, whether to undo changes to the object, compare the values that have changed, or just keep a record of the changes. The snapshotting methods provide this service, extracting or setting all properties at once and performing the necessary conversions for proper behavior. A special kind of snapshot is also used to merge an object's uncommitted changes with changes that have been committed to the external store since the object was fetched. Some of the EOEnterpriseObject methods are for enterprise objects to implement or override, and some are meant to be used as defined by the Framework.