Programming in Objective-C

19. Archiving

In Objective-C terms, archiving is the process of saving one or more objects in a format so that they can later be restored. Often, this involves writing the object(s) to a file so it can subsequently be read back in. We will discuss two methods for archiving data in this chapter: property lists and coding.

Archiving with Property Lists

Applications on Mac OS X use lists (or plists) for storing things such as your default preferences, application settings, and configuration information, so it's useful to know how to create them and read them back in. Their use for archiving purposes, however, is limited because when creating a property list for a data structure, specific object classes are not retained, multiple references to the ...