Edit Programmatically plist in the App bundle at development time - ios

Question

I have created a plist on XCode that will have a few values that I can't insert manually. So I want to add this values programmatically at development time. But it seems that I can only read the plist I can not save a plist that is on the App bundle, which makes sense at runtime.. When I will distribute my app I want everyone to have this plist file that's why I am not saving on documents or cache. How can I achieve what I want?

Answer 1

From http://www.karelia.com/cocoa_legacy/Foundation_Categories/NSFileManager__Get_.m (pasted below) you can build a path within the user's personal library with the -(NSString *) pathFromUserLibraryPath:(NSString *)inSubPath method found there.
For example, NSString *editedPlist = [self pathFromUserLibraryPath:#"my.plist"]; gets you the name of the modified plist within the user's library (even if that plist doesn't exist yet).
How you read/write it is according to what kind of plist you have, but you could read it into a dictionary with:
NSMutableDictionary *thePlist= [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:editedPlist ];
If you are unable to read, easily detected by, for example [thePlist count] == 0, then you would instead call the same initWithContentsOfFile: initializer with a path to the template within your bundle, but you would then write the plist out to the editedPlist path so it appears in the user directory.
Here is the utility method I referenced above:
/*
NSFileManager: Get the path within the user's Library directory
Original Source: <http://cocoa.karelia.com/Foundation_Categories/NSFileManager__Get_.m>
(See copyright notice at <http://cocoa.karelia.com>)
*/
/*" Return the path in the user library path of the given sub-path. In other words, if given inSubPath is "foo", the path returned will be /Users/myUser/Library/foo
"*/
- (NSString *) pathFromUserLibraryPath:(NSString *)inSubPath
{
NSArray *domains = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSLibraryDirectory,NSUserDomainMask,YES);
NSString *baseDir= [domains objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *result = [baseDir stringByAppendingPathComponent:inSubPath];
return result;
}

Answer 2

What I would suggest is writing code that checks for the plist in the documents directory at start. If it's there, read it into memory.
If you don't find the file in the documents directory, read it from the app bundle instead. Then drop into the code that uses it from memory and writes the changed version to the documents directory.
Remember that all the objects you read from a plist file are read as immutable, even if you wrote mutable objects into the file. You have to write code that makes mutable copies of anything that you want to change. (And have to implement a mutable deep copy if you have complex structures like arrays of dictionaries that in turn contain arrays of strings.)