Setup: I have a Core Data model in a SwiftUI app that has two entities, Book and Reading, with a one to many relationship such that a single book can have multiple entries in Reading for reading the book more than once. Both entities have a UUID attribute and some other attributes, and the one to many relationship is in place with the destinations and inverses. The Reading entity has a date attribute called startDate for when you start reading a book. I have a fetch request of Reading behind a List that lets you see a list of all your reading entries. That's all working great.

The Question: How do I create an NSPredicate for the Reading fetch request to return all reading entries that are either the first or last reading for a book based on the startDate?

The image has the Book and Reading entities at the top along with examples of the expected results at. the bottom with a first-only predicate and a last-only predicate. Without the predicate, it would return the full list of reading entries, which is already working fine. My feeling is that the first/last-only NSPredicate would be some kind of subquery with a sort on startDate, but I haven't been able to find a way to do this kind of request. Does anyone have a way of doing this?

Add an NSSortDescriptor to your NSPredicate to get the request sorted appropriately by startDate, then set the fetchLimit property of NSFetchRequest to 1.