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Re: Returning structs of NSStrings

At 11:26 AM +0100 25/3/2004, Michael Becker wrote:
I've noticed that dealing with large structs of NSStrings can get really annoying ("copying" these structs can only be done via copying each NSString in them [right?]). So should I make all of these into classes, providing accessor methods? Or am I missing out on something again? Should I maybe even mix Objective-C++ into it all?

Sorry for asking question that nobody should answer but myself, but I am more or less asking for stylistic guidance :-)


If you don't think it needs to have its own class just yet, a more Cocoa-flavoured approach would be to store the information in an NSDictionary or NSMutableDictionary, then you don't have to worry too much about memory management for the individual strings as long as the dictionary itself is properly handled. I've done that several times and later found that things got more complicated and I had to write new classes for the information anyway, so it might be better just to do that from the start. If you really don't want to write accessor methods, you could use key-value coding instead... just make a class with the same instance variables as you had in the struct, and no other code, and then access the variables using [user valueForKey:@"name" ] and [user takeValue:@"Steve" forKey:@"name"] (or setValue:@"Steve" forKey:@"name"] if you're targetting 10.3) for example. You'd probably want to define constants for @"name" and the other field names though to avoid the danger of mistyping. Then later if you need more complicated behaviour you can add accessors (with the appropriate names for KVC) which do more complicated things, and you won't have to change any code.

As a side note, I notice your little bit of example code has a struct with name, phone and street in it. I don't know if those field names were just examples or if they're really what your struct contains, but perhaps if you're dealing with personal contact details like that you should consider using the ABPerson class from the Address Book framework. I have no idea what your application is for but if it is handling phone numbers and addresses maybe it should be using the Address Book database and get all the benefits which come with that. (I watched the WWDC 2003 session on Address Book framework last night. Those sessions are dangerous, I've already committed myself to [re]writing a whole heap of code after being inspired by the User Experience session.)
--
Angela Brett email@hidden
http://apronyms.com/angela
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References: 
 >Returning structs of NSStrings (From: Michael Becker <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Returning structs of NSStrings (From: Michael Becker <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Returning structs of NSStrings (From: j o a r <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Returning structs of NSStrings (From: Michael Becker <email@hidden>)



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