Saving Array to Plist file that contains Custom Objects iPhone

Question

I have a class called XYZ inheriting from NSObject and an array which contains objects of XYZ. I need to write this array to a plist file on to documents directory. After trying

Answer 1

Conforming your XYZ class to the NSCoding protocol is indeed very suitable for what you're trying to do. To do so, add the NSCoding protocol to your class's interface declaration:

@interface XYZ 

Then, you need implement encodeWithCoder: and initWithCoder: in your implementation. "Encode with coder" means "take your object's current state, and pack it into a generic object called an 'encoder'". "Init with coder" means "given an already-packed encoder object, configure yourself with the data packed into the encoder". In both of these methods, the 'encoder' will be an instance of NSCoder, which has a fairly simple interface for encoding ("packing") and decoding ("unpacking") basic types.

Here's a sample implementation:

@implementation XYZ
- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder*)encoder
{
    self = [self init];

    if (self)
    {
        self.myIntProperty = [encoder decodeIntForKey:@"myInt"];
    }

    return self;
}

– (void)encodeWithCoder:(NSCoder*)decoder
{
    [decoder encodeInt:self.myIntProperty forKey:@"myInt"];
}

@end