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Re: writing & reading a file in Cocoa

I agree with Scott that it seems like a fine use for NSUserDefaults which will give your app a lot of standard niceties for dealing with preferences, and make it consistent, and give advanced users standard and known ways of interacting with your application's preferences.

Also, there are many many reasons not to write out C structures directly (or send them over the wire, etc...). Scott mentioned one which boils down to extensibility and versioning concerns. Another is byte order and scalar size concerns. You really ought to stay away from persistence strategies that do not account for potential changes in endianess or data-size of your data. Even if you do not think your data will ever need to work in a little-endian environment, 64 bit machines will be along someday, and data-sizes will change. The more you insulate yourself from such things by using standard mechanisms like NSUserDefaults (storing NSNumbers), the less work you'll have later when stuff shifts around under you.

Mike


Begin forwarded message:

From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>
Date: Wed Dec 25, 2002 8:04:24 PM US/Pacific
To: Manooch Khajeh <email@hidden>
Cc: email@hidden
Subject: Re: writing & reading a file in Cocoa

On Wednesday, December 25, 2002, at 09:58 PM, Manooch Khajeh wrote:

Happy holidays:

I am writing a preference pane. I want to read & write a C data
structure into a file. Is there an example of this anywhere?

I prefer not to use NSDictionary and instead read & write the whole C
structure as a block of data bytes.


Why not use the preferences database via userdefaults?

It'd be better to write these items out in a non-C-structure way, since this would give you better ability to change/add keys in the future.
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References: 
 >Re: writing & reading a file in Cocoa (From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>)



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