saving data to plist across multiple views

Question

Hi All,

I'm currently working on an application that users a number of different views to obtain user information and I have just hit a snag. My current method saves each user detail against a key value in a plist file, the problem is that when the user switches to another view and saves their data again, the old keys and data are overwritten.

So my question is what is more efficient, to a) have a different plist for each different view or b) read all the existing data from the file first then save the data back to the file along with the new details. Bearing in mind eventually I will want to export all of this information as XML, though it shouldn't be too difficult to read form multiple files.

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It would probably be more efficient to use multiple files. The most scarce resource on the iPhone is memory, and loading a huge plist could potentially use up a lot. Using multiple files means you don't have to load all of the plists into memory at once. If you have a lot of data, I'd also suggest taking a look at Core Data eventually.