I've got data in an NSSet, and I need to get it into an NSArray.
Do I need to sort it myself (again, this came from Core Data) or can I get it out in a sorted order?
You can specify a sort when you retrieve data with an NSFetchRequest
by setting the sortDescriptors
property to an array of NSSortDescriptor
s. But if you already have it in an NSSet
and don't want to make another fetch request, you can use:
[[theSet allObjects] sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:sortDescriptors];
It'll create an interim NSArray
when you call allObjects
and then another sorted array afterwards, so it's not 100% efficient, but the overhead should be negligible for reasonably-sized data sets (and certainly less than the cost of sorting).
Actually, I was wrong - NSSet has the sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:
method too. So you can just call [theSet sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:descriptors]
and do it all in one go.