Best way to create & store data that can be read & written to?

[BebopSong]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the best way to create and store data on the iPhone so that the app can read the data but also write to it?

I am creating an app that has a main list of items that the user can pick from to go into their own seperate list. I have been looking at property lists, which look like a good option to me but wasn't sure if I am missing other better types as I am new to Objective-C, iPhone SDK and Cocoa.

There will be quite a bit of data in the main list and the user will be constantly writing to and from their list, does this affect which data type to use?

Thanks in advance.

BebopSong

[Oliver Drobnik]

Originally Posted by BebopSong

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the best way to create and store data on the iPhone so that the app can read the data but also write to it?

I am creating an app that has a main list of items that the user can pick from to go into their own seperate list. I have been looking at property lists, which look like a good option to me but wasn't sure if I am missing other better types as I am new to Objective-C, iPhone SDK and Cocoa.

There will be quite a bit of data in the main list and the user will be constantly writing to and from their list, does this affect which data type to use?

Thanks in advance.

BebopSong

Plists are fine for small amounts of data, but the drawback is that you don't have random access, you always need to read/write the whole file.

For iWoman I used encodeers/decoders because at that time I thought that SQLite was too difficult.

But for GeoCorder I tryied out SQLite and now I would not do anything else. I learned the most from the SQLite Books example, copyied most of my data code from there.

With 3.0 comes Core Data and this will most likely be the standard way to do it beginning in June. I played a little with it and it is very cool, although you lose the ability to customize your table structure it will fit 99% of devs.

[BebopSong]

Thanks for the quick response, I will look into SQLite.

[MattjDrake]

SQLite is one way that I use, but it is a little bit of work. If you are not dealing with massive amounts of data then you could probably just use NSMutableArray or NSMutableDictionary. They have methods built in that read and write data - plus you can nest the arrays if you are feeling clever.

Here is a blog post where I wrote some code that does this:

How to Save the Contents of an Array to the iPhone’s Filesystem | How to Make iPhone Apps