Question

I have a IOS plist generated by a third party’s app I am trying to interface to, consequently I cannot modify the format of the plist. The part that is giving me trouble is an array of Dictionaries, the cardList array. I have loaded the plist into a NSMutableDictionary with no problem and can ‘dump’ the cardList and colorLabelList arrays.

First Question: What is the best way to access each member of the Item array’s? i.e., draft, label, etc. for each of the cards in the list.

2nd Question: Is my ‘loading into a NSMutableDictionary’ approach the best choice?

Here is the layout of the plist:

cardlist   Array
  item 0   Dictionary
     draft   boolean
     label   string
     notes   string
     ...
  item 1   Dictionary
     draft
     label
     notes
     ...
name       string
sortOrder  number

Answer 1

Use NSMutableDictionary only if you are actually going to change the data, otherwise use a standard NSDictionary (this is more of style thing, the actual implementation does not really change).

If you want to cycle through the cardlist array, do the following:

//This will enumerate through the array element by element
for (NSMutableDictionary *dictionary in cardlist) {
   //Ok, now we have a dictionary from cardlist
   //Let's print the items to the console
   NSLog(@"draft: %i", [dictionary valueForKey:@"draft"]); //Note, there are better ways print print a bool to the log, but this will work for now
   NSLog(@"label: %@", [dictionary valueForKey:@"label"]);
   NSLog(@"notes: %@", [dictionary valueForKey:@"notes"]);

}

That should go through all of your cardlist array and print the values.