Question

I am developing one application. In it I get 1000 results from xml parsing. Every result has different attributes. So I create one class for the attributes and create one object for every result. I save the results in one array. My doubt is due to the fact that this is a lot of results and I may face memory problems. If this is a problem, how do I handle that? Please tell me how to do this.

Answer 1

If you’re parsing an exceptionally large document, use NSXMLParser and a delegate object to parse the document. Rather than creating an enormous tree of objects to represent the XML, the parser will call your delegate each time it encounters a new attribute, element, etc. This way you can build up your data objects directly, without wasting memory on an intermediate XML parse tree representation.

Once you are doing this, you can save the objects as you create them, or in batches.

If you’re very memory conscious, you can actually use NSXMLParser to parse the input stream as it is downloading, so you never even need to have the full XML text in memory. (To avoid interruptions you could also download to a disk file, then parse from the file.)