Parsing multiple XML files into one or more Object-classes?

Question

My app is made up of a TabBarController, each tab with a UITableView.

On launch I parse an XML file from my server into an Object class and then display the objects in the first tableview.

My question is, what do I do when I want to parse a second XML file? Currently, when doing so, the information in "XML-file-2" will overwrite the objects parsed by "XML-file-1". How do I go about this properly? Do I set up another Object class for each XML file or is there another to work around the issue?

I am using NSXMLParser.

Answer 1

I think you should consider having two instances of XMLParser, one for each XML file you want to read. It allows you to read as many XML files concurrently without affecting each other. It is also more modular.

Answer 2

on line 21 of that snippet ( http://pastie.org/537227 ) you are setting the products array (appDelegate.products)to a new mutable array. if you want the second run to append to appDelegate.products, you should see if appDelegate.products already has objects in it, if so, don't assign a new array to it, just add to them to it using NSMutableArray's addObject: method

Answer 3

... Don't overwrite the data that's already there...?

If you're displaying the contents in a UITableView, then I'd be willing to bet you've got an NSArray in there somewhere. Hopefully, if you've set this up properly, the NSArray contains model objects, each one of which corresponds to one row in your UITableView. However, I would suggest using NSMutableArray. Then when you parse the second XML file and build your model objects out of that, just use NSMutableArray's addObject: method and then reloadData on the UITableView.

Answer 4

As notnoop already mentioned, to make multiple NSXMLParser instances would be the best solution.
A open source iPhone RSS reader called Simple RSS Reader would be a good sample of what you want now.
You might use RSSParser class of the Simple RSS Reader as it is.

HTH