Question

I have a dictionary as the value for another dictionary:

10 = {
        createdate = "2012-03-20 15:04:09.125177-05";
     }

I would like to set a value to the inner dictionary without having to pull it out, but

[NSDicionary setObject:forKey:]

only goes one deep. can I add another key to that? I tried

[[NSDicionary setObject:forKey:]forKey:]

but xCode didn’t like that.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Assuming that your dictionaries are mutable, you can use:

[[yourDictionary objectForKey:@"10"] setObject:newDate forKey:@"createdate"]];

To see how that works, note that it’s equivalent to this:

NSMutableDictionary *innerDict = [someDictionary objectForKey:@"10"];
[innerDict setObject:newDate forKey:@"createdate"]];

If your dictionaries aren’t mutable, you’ll need to do more work. First, if the outer dictionary isn’t mutable:

yourDictionary = [yourDictionary mutableCopy];

And if the inner dictionary isn’t mutable:

NSMutableDictionary *newInnerDict = [[yourDictionary objectForKey:@"10"] mutableCopy];
[newInnerDict setObject:newDate forKey:@"createdate"]];
[yourDictionary setObject:newInnerDict forKey:@"10"];