Question

I’m developing an iPhone app. I’ve got a function that reads data from a sqlite database and puts the results into an array. Everything works fine. Here is part of the function that fills the array:

while(sqlite3_step(compiledStatement) == SQLITE_ROW) {
    NSString *aVar1 = [NSString stringWithUTF8String(char*)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 0)];
    NSString *aVar2 = [NSString stringWithUTF8String(char*)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 1)];

    NSArray  *anArray = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:aVar1,aVar2,nil];
    [returnArray addObject:anArray]
    [anArray release];
}
//return the array

I want to make this function more generic so that it takes a sql statement string as a parameter, and returns a mutablearray of arrays, no matter how many columns are in the result set.

Is there a way to do this? The solution doesn’t have to include arrays — could be any collection object. I’m just looking for a way to make the function re-usable for other queries to the same database.

Answer 1

Couldn’t you just do something like:

int numCols = sqlite3_column_count(compiledStatement);
NSMutableArray *result = [NSMutableArray array];
while(sqlite3_step(compiledStatement) == SQLITE_ROW) {
    NSMutableArray *array = [NSMutableArray array];
    for (int i = 0; i < numCols; i++) {
        [array addObject:
         [NSString stringWithUTF8String:
          (char *)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, i)]];
    }
    [result addObject:array];
}