Question

I have interesting thing here, I’m using xcode 4 for my project and I want to create simple .plist file to save several values which will be used for different purposes during code execution. This is the code I use to create plist:

- (NSString *)dataFilePath {
    NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(
    NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
    NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
    return [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"somelist.plist];
}

last line of code which should append plist name to path do not do its job. Plist is never created. Now, strange thing, i manage to create one few days ago using same code. After that, I only move this piece of code in AppDelegate because, I call this code from different places. I discovered that isn’t working when I switch to 4.3 emulator and then also try it on iphone device. When I switch to 4.2 emulator it works because there is already a plist, however when I change its name (to create new one) nothing happens – meaning, list is not created. I also try moving code back to original place, but that didn’t gave desired result.

Answer 1

Your code should not create a plist anyway, only return a path. In order to actually save a plist at the chosen path, you could choose several approaches, for example use the following method on NSDictionary:

- (void)saveDictionary 
{
    NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"bla" forKey:@"test"];
    NSString *path = [self datafilePath];
    [dictionary writeToFile:path atomically:YES];
}

- (NSString *)dataFilePath {
    NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(
    NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
    NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
    return [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"somelist.plist];
}