iOS What is the way to save objects? (so far only used plist)

[yalag]

So far all the persistence data for my app has been done with plist which accepts id of a basic type (NSNumber, NSDate etc). What is the best way to save a NSArray of Object, of which the object has members of a lot of data? Do I have to save each member manually or is there a neat way of saving objects?

 

[kainjow]

NSCoding is your friend.

 

[yalag]

When should you be using NSCoder, when plist?

 

[kainjow]

You can use NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver to save/load an object that conforms to the NSCoding protocol into an NSData object, which can then be inserted into a property list.

 

[yalag]

You can use NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver to save/load an object that conforms to the NSCoding protocol into an NSData object, which can then be inserted into a property list.

ah thank you. so just have to use plist either way for iphone data? Or can you just use the archiver to save to disk directly?

 

[kainjow]

You can save an NSData object using writeToFile:atomically: