基于另一个创建iOS plist

Question

I'm very new to iOS development and am having an issue. I have a plist that contains a lot of information for a bunch of different animals. The plist is an array of dictionaries, and each dictionary is an animal. Each dictionary has a key called “type”, which is the type of animal (cat, dog, bird, etc). I want my application to first display a table view that lists all of the possible types. When the user selects the type, they will then go to another table view that lists all of the animals of that selected type. They can then select that specific animal and another view will be displayed that has all the detailed information about that specific animal. I suppose the best way to approach this is that when a user selects the “type” of animal, a new plist will be generated containing the directory entries from the original plist that have a “type” key that matches what the user selects. How can I implement this? Would this logic be in the viewDidLoad method for the second table view? Once the plist is created that contains only the animals of interest, the cellForRowAtIndexPath method would display the list of animals? Thanks for any assistance! David

Answer 1

First: You shouldn't generate any new plists in this situation... If you want to store a list of dictionaries based on a query of your data, it should go into an NSMutableDictionary/NSDictionary. Before creating each table, you should construct one of these dictionaries with the filtered data, and pass it to the table as the data source.

Second: I'd try using a database instead of a plist to make your queries a little easier to manage.

Third: Normalize your data as much as possible, hence, have a database table (or plist if you go that route) of "animal types," and a db table/plist of "animals" ... then reference the animal's type by id, instead of by name. If you change that name in the future, you'll have a hell of a time trying to find every occurrence. In addition, it's less buggy that way; one accidental misspelling will leave you wondering why one animal is causing an error and the others aren't.