Accessing objects in NSMutableDictionary by index

Question

To display key/values from an NSMutableDictionary sequentially (in a tableview), I need to access them by index. If access by index could give the key at that index, I could than get the value. Is there a way to do that or a different technique?

Answer 1

you can get an array of all the keys with the allKeys method of the dictionary; and then you can access the array by index. however, a dictionary by itself does not have an inherent ordering, so the ordering of the keys you get before and after a change to the dictionary can be completely different

Answer 2

You can get an NSArray containing the keys of the object using the allKeys method. You can then look into that by index. Note that the order in which the keys appear in the array is unknown. Example:

NSMutableDictionary *dict;

/* Create the dictionary. */

NSArray *keys = [dict allkeys];
id aKey = [keys objectAtIndex:0];
id anObject = [dict objectForKey:aKey];

EDIT: Actually, if I understand what you're trying to do what you want is easily done using fast enumeration, for example:

NSMutableDictionary *dict;

/* Put stuff in dictionary. */

for (id key in dict) {
    id anObject = [dict objectForKey:key];
    /* Do something with anObject. */
}