Question

Here’s the issue, I launch my app from Xcode and it gets up and running then I switch to settings.app and change a toggle from NO to YES and when I switch back to my app, the key outputs NO not YES.

i think i’m running up against the quote below, but not sure how to get around it, if the user launches the app, and goes to settings and changes the toggle, its now out of sync because Settings.app outputs on first launch to NO. Doesn’t make sense that a user can’t change the setting the first time they switch to settings.app

“For newly installed applications, default preference values from the application’s Settings bundle are not set until the Settings application runs. This means that if the user runs your application before running Settings, the default values specified in your Settings bundle are unavailable.”

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions

NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
NSDictionary *appDefaults = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"NO" forKey:@"hideActionBar"];
[defaults registerDefaults:appDefaults];
[defaults synchronize];

and then the code i use to check it

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application {
 NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
 BOOL hidden = [defaults boolForKey:@"hideActionBar"];
 NSLog(@"%d",hidden);

if (hidden) {
    viewController.actionButton.enabled = NO;

} else {


    viewController.actionButton.enabled = YES;
}    
}

and my settings Root.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"      "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Type</key>
<string>PSToggleSwitchSpecifier</string>
<key>Title</key>
<string>Hide Action Bar</string>
<key>Key</key>
<string>hideActionBar</string>
<key>DefaultValue</key>
<false/>
<key>TrueValue</key>
<true/>
<key>FalseValue</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</plist>

Answer 1

For BOOL variables you need not to set any value if want it to be NO. Because when you will try to access it first time it will return you the same. So remove registerDefaults code(all four lines) from your applicationDidFinishLaunchingWithOptions method.

Explanation:

When you change setting from NO to YES and launch your application, in applicationDidFinishLaunchingWithOptions this value is once changed to NO programmatically.

Note: Whenever you use settings bundle in your application, prior to registering a value(object value, because primitive types will return 0) check whether that value is nil(it means still unregistered), if the value for key is nil then only register with initial default values else you will end up in changing the values each time programmatically.

Thanks,