Cocoa Core Data efficient way to count entities

I don't know whether using NSFetchedResultsController is the most efficient way to accomplish your goal (but it may be). The explicit code to get the count of entity instances is below:

// assuming NSManagedObjectContext *moc

NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
[request setEntity:[NSEntityDescription entityForName:entityName inManagedObjectContext:moc]];

[request setIncludesSubentities:NO]; //Omit subentities. Default is YES (i.e. include subentities)

NSError *err;
NSUInteger count = [moc countForFetchRequest:request error:&err];
if(count == NSNotFound) {
  //Handle error
}

[request release];

I'll just add that to make it even more efficient... and because its just a count, you don't really need any property value and certainly like one of the code examples above you don't need sub-entities either.

So, the code should be like this:

int entityCount = 0;
NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"YourEntity" inManagedObjectContext:_managedObjectContext];
NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
[fetchRequest setEntity:entity];
[fetchRequest setIncludesPropertyValues:NO];
[fetchRequest setIncludesSubentities:NO];
NSError *error = nil;
NSUInteger count = [_managedObjectContext countForFetchRequest: fetchRequest error: &error];
if(error == nil){
    entityCount = count;
}

Hope it helps.

To be clear, you aren't counting entities, but instances of a particular entity. (To literally count the entities, ask the managed object model for the count of its entities.)

To count all the instances of a given entity without fetching all the data, the use -countForFetchRequest:.

For example:

NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
[request setEntity: [NSEntityDescription entityForName: entityName inManagedObjectContext: context]];

NSError *error = nil;
NSUInteger count = [context countForFetchRequest: request error: &error];

[request release];

return count;

Swift

It is fairly easy to get a count of the total number of instances of an entity in Core Data:

let context = (UIApplication.sharedApplication().delegate as! AppDelegate).managedObjectContext
let fetchRequest = NSFetchRequest(entityName: "MyEntity")
let count = context.countForFetchRequest(fetchRequest, error: nil)

I tested this in the simulator with a 400,000+ object count and the result was fairly fast (though not instantaneous).