NSArray of NSDictionaries into NSDictionary of NSArrays

Question

I have created an NSDictionary of NSArrays based on a keyValue from the NSDictionaries found in the original NSArray. However I have an issue where the values inside the original NSDictionary are all strings but contain numbers.

The reason this is a problem is because my sorted NSMutableArray looks like this

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
... etc

the issue being is it gets sorted into the NSDictionary of arrays like this

1
10
11
12
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

I would like to know how to keep the orginal order found in the original NSMutableArray of NSDictionaries?

This is how I am creating the NSDictionary of Arrays.

NSMutableDictionary *sortedDictionaryArraysForTableView = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];

for (NSDictionary *dict in xmlMArray) {
    NSString *currentNumberString = [dict objectForKey:@"Number"];
    if(![[sortedDictionaryArraysForTableView allKeys] containsObject:currentNumberString])
        sortedDictionaryArraysForTableView[currentNumberString] = [NSMutableArray array];
    [sortedDictionaryArraysForTableView[currentNumberString] addObject:dict];
}

Answer 1

NSDictionary is an unordered collection. You can't keep the original order (or any order) when you store things in a dictionary. For ordered collections, you want NSArray or NSOrderedSet.