Question

I currently write to and read from an array of data, and use the index of each element to achieve something. I need a way to store this array, I looked at the user defaults, but that stores a dictionary, with retieval using keys. I will not know what key was stored.

What is the best was to store ths array of data on the iphone?

Regards

Answer 1

NSKeyedArchiver, a concrete subclass
of NSCoder, provides a way to encode
objects (and scalar values) into an
architecture-independent format that
can be stored in a file.

So you can serialize anything you like to a file:

// need a path
- (NSString*) getPath
{ 
    NSString* path = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) lastObject];
    return [path stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"someInfo"];
}

// save an array
- (void) save:(NSArray*)array
{
    [NSKeyedArchiver archiveRootObject:array toFile:[self getPath]];    
}

// get that array back
- (NSArray*) load
{
     return [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithFile:[self getPath]];       
}

You might want to serialize a dictionary of arrays if you have more than one you want to store.