How to save NSMutablearray in NSUserDefaults

user2841148 picture user2841148 · Oct 28, 2013 · Viewed 79.6k times · Source

I have two NSMutableArray's. They consist of images or text. The arrays are displayed via a UITableView. When I kill the app the data within the UITableView gets lost. How to save array in UITableView by using NSUserDefault?

Answer

Tim picture Tim · Oct 28, 2013

Note: NSUserDefaults will always return an immutable version of the object you pass in.

To store the information:

// Get the standardUserDefaults object, store your UITableView data array against a key, synchronize the defaults
NSUserDefaults *userDefaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
[userDefaults setObject:arrayOfImage forKey:@"tableViewDataImage"];
[userDefaults setObject:arrayOfText forKey:@"tableViewDataText"];
[userDefaults synchronize];

To retrieve the information:

NSUserDefaults *userDefaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
NSArray *arrayOfImages = [userDefaults objectForKey:@"tableViewDataImage"];
NSArray *arrayOfText = [userDefaults objectForKey:@"tableViewDataText"];
// Use 'yourArray' to repopulate your UITableView

On first load, check whether the result that comes back from NSUserDefaults is nil, if it is, you need to create your data, otherwise load the data from NSUserDefaults and your UITableView will maintain state.

Update

In Swift-3, the following approach can be used:

let userDefaults = UserDefaults.standard

userDefaults.set(arrayOfImage, forKey:"tableViewDataImage")
userDefaults.set(arrayOfText, forKey:"tableViewDataText")
userDefaults.synchronize()

var arrayOfImages = userDefaults.object(forKey: "tableViewDataImage")
var arrayOfText = userDefaults.object(forKey: "tableViewDataText")