Question

I have a large number of nested dictionaries and the leaf (or most nested) dictionaries store integer data and integer keys. All the information remains constant (but may change in a future release). I am currently allocating the dictionaries from constants in code but I feel I should be reading that information from XML or similar. I have read about Core information, plists, databases and archives but I don’t want the user to be able to change it, I never want to be able to write it (except maybe during the release procedure) and I never want to display it. I would like to be able to hand edit it before release.

What is the best method to store this constant data?

Answer 1

Basically you need to ship your data in files with the app –
XML or JSON are both suitable for this. When I have had to do something similar I used JSON

It works something like this :

Define your JSON in text file (UTF8) and then use the

NSString initWithContentsOfFile to load file contents into a NSString

You can then use the NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData to give you the top level dictionary for your JSON

NSDictionary* json = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:kNilOptions  error:&error];

From this you can extract your NSStrings / NSArrays using NSDictionary objectForKey for your data. Obviously the exact format will depend on your JSON format