Nested structures to iCloud

Question

I have an iOS Swift 3.0 App working with a plist (Array of Dictionaries). Now I'd like to add iCloud support to this App.

I found out that it's not so easy to create a custom sorting of the records in iCloud, especially when you allow your user to change the sorting of the table view rows with the 'moveRowAt' method.

To avoid this problem the best would be to create a data structure that represents a copy of my plist and upload it to iCloud. But such nested structures aren't supported for the key-value-storage as far as I know.

With the help of this discussion: Structs to NSData I tried to convert my Dictionaries to NSData and put them in an Array (List of Binaries) which is accepted by iCloud but as you see in the discussion it is not a bulletproof way of handling the data yet.

So what opportunities do I have? I read something about creating custom document structures but I have no experiences with that and didn't find a tutorial so far.

Probably not the answer you want, but: in Swift 4, converting back and forth between variables and `Data` will be built into the language. — BallpointBen, May 24 '17 at 15:27
It means if you wait til the end of the year, the solution to this problem will be built into the language. — BallpointBen, May 24 '17 at 17:54
Oh, that's cool :) I heard that there will be changes to strings and coding/encoding — Martin, May 25 '17 at 07:51

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 25 '17 at 19:32

0

Martin,

You will find an answer here.

Command-line tool for converting PLIST to JSON?

and here

PList to JSON converter and processing JSON response on client

Convert your plist into JSON data object and then save that as an asset in iCloud.

answered May 25 '17 at 19:32

user3069232

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Thank's a lot! Sounds like a good idea. Never heard about this command line tool before... – Martin May 27 '17 at 17:45

Nested structures to iCloud

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