Introduction

Archives and serializations are two ways in which you can create architecture-independent byte streams of hierarchical data. Byte streams can then be written to a file or transmitted to another process, perhaps over a network. When the byte stream is decoded, the hierarchy is regenerated. Archives provide a detailed record of a collection of interrelated objects and values. Serializations record only the simple hierarchy of property-list values.

You should read this document to learn how to create and extract archived representations of object graphs.

Organization of This Document

This programming topic contains the following articles:

• Object Graphs introduces the concept of an object graph and discusses the two techniques for turning objects into byte streams: archives and serializations.

• Archives describes the different types of archive and archiver classes.

• Creating and Extracting Archives describes how to create and extract an archive.

• Encoding and Decoding Objects describes how to implement the methods that allow an object to be encoded in and decoded from archives.

• Encoding and Decoding C Data Types describes how to encode and decode C data types that do not have convenience methods defined in the archive classes.

• Forward and Backward Compatibility for Keyed Archives provides some tips on how to make your classes more compatible with previous and future versions of your classes in keyed archives.

• Subclassing NSCoder provides some tips on how to create your own coder classes.

• Serializing Property Lists describes how to create and read serialized representations of a property list.