CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneobjective-ccocoa-touchnsdate
Rits
Rits

Reputation: 5175

Best way to store a 'time' value

My class needs two properties: startTime and endTime. What is the best class to use? I know there is NSDate, but I only need to store a specific time (something in between 00:00-23:59), I don't need a date. What is the most elegant solution here?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 278

Answers (4)

PeyloW
PeyloW

Reputation: 36752

I believe the most elegant solution, and what you want, is NSTimeInterval, that is the primitive type that NSDate is built on top.

NSTimeInterval is a typedef for double, and is a measurement of time in seconds. This primitive time type do not have any concept of a reference date. What NSDate do is to add this concept of reference date and anchor the 0.0 time at 1 January 2001 GMT. There is nothing that stops you from inventing your own reference date or anchor, like for example "midnight of whatever day there is".

What you can do is to add two properties of the NSTimeInterval either as startTime and endTime and let them both use midnight as the reference. Or you could skip endTime and go for a startTime and duration combo.

Upvotes: 1

Evan Mulawski
Evan Mulawski

Reputation: 55334

The NSDate class is similar to the DateTime class in C#: both hold a date and time, but they can be independent of each other. In Cocoa, you would compare two NSDate classes:

//Create NSDate objects in the time format
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"HH:mm:ss"];
NSString *startTimeString = @"00:00:00"; //0 seconds
NSString *endTimeString = @"00:00:52"; //52 seconds
NSDate *startTime = [dateFormatter dateFromString:startTimeString];
NSDate *endTime = [dateFormatter dateFromString:endTimeString];

//Compare the time
BOOL date1before2 = [startTime compare:endTime] == NSOrderedAscending;

Upvotes: 0

Jasarien
Jasarien

Reputation: 58448

NSTimeInterval is probably good enough for this.

It stores a time value in seconds as a double.

Eg. 5 mins = 300.0

Upvotes: 3

user23743
user23743

Reputation:

There's NSDateComponents, which "can also be used to specify a duration of time, for example, 5 hours and 16 minutes."

Upvotes: 0

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