Introduction to Property Lists
Contents:
Property lists provide Cocoa applications with a uniform way to store, organize and access data. This document explains what property lists are and how to use them.
Note: The user defaults system, which you programmatically access through the NSUserDefaults class, uses property lists to store objects representing user preferences. This limitation would seem to exclude many kinds of objects, such as NSColor and NSFont objects, from the user default system. But if objects conform to the NSCoding protocol they can be archived to NSData objects, which are property list–compatible objects. For information on how to do this, see “Storing NSColor in User Defaults“; although this article focuses on NSColor objects, the procedure can be applied to any object that can be archived.
Organization of This Document
This document describes property lists and their various representations, and how to work with them.
“About Property Lists” explains what property lists are and when you should use them.
“XML Property Lists” describes the format XML property lists.
“Using XML Property Lists” describes how to work with XML property lists.
“Old-Style ASCII Property Lists” describes the format of old-style (non-XML) ASCII property lists.
“Using Old-Style Property Lists” describes how to create old-style (non-XML) ASCII property lists and convert them back to property list representations in memory.
“Binary Property Lists” describes binary representations of property lists and how to create and restore them.
“Element Mutability” describes how the mutability of elements in a property list is determined when you load a property list from file.
Last updated: 2006-11-07
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