CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosobjective-ciphonensuserdefaultsbackend
apolo
apolo

Reputation: 461

NSUserDefaults or a backend?

I have to ship a simple app with a very tight deadline so I have no time to learn anything othen than what I know (meaning learning Core Data for example). Would it fine to use NSUserDefaults to store data for my app? It's almost like a check list app where users have list of items with some data accompanying each item.

Other than that I would be using a service like Parse which I can handle thanks to having built my last app with it.

Would Apple reject an app if you use NSUserDefaults for something other than settings/preferences?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 144

Answers (4)

Fifo
Fifo

Reputation: 25

Go for NSUserDefault fro now ! When the App is submitted fro approval, look at SQlLite. this will be useful for the next projects. Parse... sure but make sure it's not overkilling especially if you have limited amount of data Good Luck !

Upvotes: 0

user3693546
user3693546

Reputation:

Apple wouldn't reject even if you unnecessarily burden NSUserDefault. But users of your App will definitely uninstall it or OS will kill it if app crashes or hangs their iPhone.

NSUserDefault : is a fast way to access the data. it stores in (key,value) pair and lives as long as your app is installed in phone. Usually session based small amount of data is supposed to be stored in it. Not ur entire database.

Database (CoreData or Sqlite) : Behind the seen Coredata is also a sqlite with objects talking to each other(Think in terms of model instead of tables if using Coredata).

I simple suggest you use Coredata if your data by any chance is big or expected to get big. CoreData wont take much time.

Upvotes: 1

Kai Schaller
Kai Schaller

Reputation: 443

From Apple's documentation:

The NSUserDefaults class provides a programmatic interface for interacting with the defaults system. The defaults system allows an application to customize its behavior to match a user’s preferences. For example, you can allow users to determine what units of measurement your application displays or how often documents are automatically saved. Applications record such preferences by assigning values to a set of parameters in a user’s defaults database. The parameters are referred to as defaults since they’re commonly used to determine an application’s default state at startup or the way it acts by default.

[...]

Values returned from NSUserDefaults are immutable, even if you set a mutable object as the value. For example, if you set a mutable string as the value for "MyStringDefault", the string you later retrieve using stringForKey: will be immutable.

In other words, this is not the place to store mutable application data.

If the checklist data is going to be modified by end users (i.e. adding new items, or editing the text of the items on the checklist) it really would be worthwhile to learn how to use Core Data. Over the years it really has become very easy to learn and use.

You can find a great series of Core Data tutorials at http://code.tutsplus.com/series/core-data-from-scratch--cms-653

If you're looking for something that's been updated for iOS 8 and Swift (although they're mainly syntax changes for the new language), you can check out http://www.raywenderlich.com/85578/first-core-data-app-using-swift.

Upvotes: 2

klein
klein

Reputation: 54

Yes, you can store data in NSUserDefaults, which will be the quick and dirty method to store data locally.

You could use Core Data, though I prefer to just use FMDB and write my own SQLite statements. You could also use NSFileManager and just read and write everything to a JSON file. Parse will probably be overkill if all you are doing is storing a list of check list objects.

Upvotes: 0

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