New NSDictionary entry not in right order

Question

I have an array of NSString values called sortedRefs and each of them is also a key to a NSDictionary called quotes.

What I 'm trying to do is pass that key into a new NSDictionary with its related value if a condition is met.

for (NSString *key in sortedRefs) {
    NSLog(@"%@", key);
    if ([[self.quotesManager.quotes[key] valueForKey:@"active"] boolValue]) {
        [self.activeQuotes setObject:self.quotesManager.quotes[key] forKey:key];
        NSLog(@"%@", [self.activeQuotes allKeys]);
    }
}

The problem is that the activeQuotes dictionary is not populated in the order I insert values in. To be more specific my output after the first three loops is

2016-05-26 23:10:59.939 Project[2553:94502] DE2109D0C637CBD755E91ED18F85C17E
2016-05-26 23:10:59.940 Project[2553:94502] (
    DE2109D0C637CBD755E91ED18F85C17E
)
2016-05-26 23:10:59.940 Project[2553:94502] 309FFEB2DEC0F938D3E5FFD39112F9F6
2016-05-26 23:10:59.940 Project[2553:94502] (
    DE2109D0C637CBD755E91ED18F85C17E,
    309FFEB2DEC0F938D3E5FFD39112F9F6
)
2016-05-26 23:10:59.940 Project[2553:94502] 925DEC6CFB3FDF87530677FE93E97A46
2016-05-26 23:10:59.940 Project[2553:94502] (
    925DEC6CFB3FDF87530677FE93E97A46,
    DE2109D0C637CBD755E91ED18F85C17E,
    309FFEB2DEC0F938D3E5FFD39112F9F6
)

As you can see when I insert 925DEC6CFB3FDF87530677FE93E97A46 instead of going after the 309FFEB2DEC0F938D3E5FFD39112F9F6 key it goes on top. As the loops go on this happens more frequently and I end up with a completely different order than the one I had in the sortedRefs array.

Is there a way to keep the order while inserting new entries in my dictionary?

Answer 1

Dictionaries are not stored in any guaranteed order. They are designed to be referenced by key. If you want to access them in a particular order, you need to keep an ordered collection of the keys (e.g. array) and use that to choose them.