Introduction

Explains how to put Cocoa objects into and remove them from a representation suitable for archiving.

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.