I have a large class I'm archiving that I would like to lazy-load.
It's basically a wrapper around a NSArray and what I'd like to do is
load some instance variables but leave the array archived until a
later time in order to save time and memory.
When I implement the NSCoding protocol methods initWithCoder: and
encodeWithCoder: is it a bad idea to de-archive the keys that I need
and just retain the NSCoder object so that I can later de-archive
the NSArray? Is there any problem keeping the NSCoder object around
for long periods of time? Is there a better way of doing this?
I'd hate to have to archive two separate objects in order to
implement this, one which is the actual class with a placeholder
array and then the large array separately, but I guess that's
another way to go.
How large are you talking about?
Have you actually profiled to see whether there is some genuine reason
for wanting to do this, or are you just going on a "gut feeling" that
it might be slow?
I'm not sure whether NSCoder preloads the entire archive into memory
or not, but if it does and you retain the coder, you won't be saving
time and memory anyway - in fact it could be worse on memory - much
worse if your archive uses XML format. If it ends up being necessary
there are solutions. Separate archives is one way, and that could be
combined with packaging your document.
