Store paragraphs of text (including line breaks) in cloud kit and query

Question

I have another newbie question. Hopefully one of you programming gurus can help me with it.

I'm trying to fetch multiple paragraphs of text (e.g. a news article) from CloudKit. I don't know how to format the text so that it includes a line break. I've been told that I should use CKAsset instead of a String on the CloudKit record, but I don't understand how it's supposed to be formatted.

Can anyone help me understand this more?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Would it suffice to have \n as the new line identifier? CKAsset is the way to go, you just need to:

• create the file
• create asset with the file's url
• save it to database
• remove the temp file afterwards.

When you get the record from CloudKit:

• access it's file path
• load the data using NSFileManager
• decode the data (this uses NSString, which is a bore, but don't know any other way)

Save Record:

let str = "sample \n string save to file"
if let url = NSURL(fileURLWithPath: NSTemporaryDirectory())?.URLByAppendingPathComponent("tempFile", isDirectory: false) {
    if str.writeToURL(url, atomically: true, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding, error: nil) {
        let asset = CKAsset(fileURL: url)
        let record = CKRecord(recordType: "TextAsset")
        record.setValue(asset, forKey: "text")
        CKContainer.defaultContainer().publicCloudDatabase.saveRecord(record) { savedRecord, error in
            if error != nil {
                println(error)
            } else {
                println(savedRecord)
            }
            // do this in completion closure, otherwise the file gets deleted before uploading
            NSFileManager.defaultManager().removeItemAtURL(url, error: nil)
        }
    }
}

Load record:

let predicate = NSPredicate(value: true)
let query = CKQuery(recordType: "TextAsset", predicate: predicate)
CKContainer.defaultContainer().publicCloudDatabase.performQuery(query, inZoneWithID: nil) { queryRecords, error in
    if let records = queryRecords {
        for record in records {
            let asset = record.valueForKey("text") as! CKAsset
            if let content = NSFileManager.defaultManager().contentsAtPath(asset.fileURL.path!) {
                let text = NSString(data: content, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
                println(text)
            }
        }
    }
}

Remember to handle errors appropriately, this is just a showcase sample code.