Question

I have a Cocoa application which reads and saves data in a sole file. This file is, in fact, a piece of the app; you can think about it as a configuration file. What would be the best place to save this file? Inside the <App name>.app/ dir? In some hidden directory at the user’s home?

Thanks in advance?

Answer 1

Don’t put it in the .app package. It might not be writable for the user, and the settings file will then be global, not per-user.

The most appropriate place is probably in the user’s application support directory: ~/Library/Application Support/FooApp (where FooApp is the name of your application). You can build a path to this directory with the following bit of code (which may need to be adapted slightly to your purposes):

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSApplicationSupportDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *path = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
path = [path stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"FooApp"];    // The file will go in this directory
NSString *saveFilePath = [path stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"save_file.dat"];