Writing Data to Plist as a Hierarchy

Question

I am working on an app that contains several sets of lists. These will contain a lot of items which will in turn contain more items. I want to save and load this to/from a PList in the docs directory, but I am unsure of how to write data in the hierarchy that I am looking for. This is the hierarchy:

>Lists
>>List1
>>>Item1
>>>>Item1Details
>>>Item2
>>>>Item2Details
>>>etc.
>>List2
>>>Item1
>>>>Item1Details
>>etc.

I have tried using NSDictionary writeToFile, but I still do not know how to have such a hierarchy.

Please give me some pointers on how to read/write this kind of thing. I am completely new to this use of plists, so please bear with me.

Cheers,

HBhargava

Answer 1

Perhaps, this will help you.

NSArray *paths=NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory,NSUserDomainMask,YES);
    NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
    NSString *path = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"data.plist"];

    NSString Item1=@"Name";
    NSString Item2=@"Age";
    NSString Item1Detail=@"Khalid";
    NSString Item2Detail=@"21";


        NSMutableDictionary *_list1 = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
        NSMutableDictionary *_list2 = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];

        [_list1 setValue:Item1Detail forKey:Item1];
        [_list1 setValue:Item2Detail forKey:Item2];

        [_list2 setValue:Item1Detail forKey:Item1];
        [_list2 setValue:Item2Detail forKey:Item2];

        NSMutableArray *_lists = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
        [_lists addObject:_list1];
        [_lists addObject:_list2];

        [_list1 release]
        [_list2 release];

        [_lists writeToFile:path atomically:YES];

        [_lists release];