I am making a simple iPhone app that will basically be an editor.
As such, I need some way to store the documents the user creates.
Since on iPhone, the concept of the filesystem is not present for the user, I searched around to see what I should use.
I found this question & answer that basically says to use Core Data, but I recently found out about NSFileManager.
My question simply is, for user-created documents, what is the best storage system to use? Traditional files by using NSFileManager? Core Data? Something else?
Personally, I would use CoreData because it will abstract away all of the file-management code for you. If you are making simple text documents then this isn’t such a big deal, but if you are working with a complex document architecture (i.e., a collection a numerous objects) then it can save you a lot of effort.
If the user wants to export their document it is very easy to write a function to do so with your CoreData objects.
The only downside to CoreData is that if you are using non-standard attributes it can get a little bit tricky, but it is certainly not a deal breaker in most cases.
People create document formats without CoreData all of the time, so there are plenty of examples out there, and it will just come down to personal preference. There really isn’t any generalized right answer to this – it a design decision that should be evaluated on a per-app basis.