Cocoa - How To Format An XML File

Question

Is there a way that I can format an XML file in the proper way when creating it programmatically?

For example, if I use this code to create a simple XML File:

NSXMLElement *fallback_driver = [[NSXMLElement alloc] initWithName:@"fallback-driver"];

NSXMLElement *folder = [[NSXMLElement alloc] initWithName:@"folder"];
[folder setStringValue:[ads_make objectValueOfSelectedItem]];
NSXMLElement *filename =[[NSXMLElement alloc] initWithName:@"filename"];
[filename setStringValue:ads_driver_name_selected];

[fallback_driver addChild:folder];
[fallback_driver addChild:filename];

NSXMLElement* rootNode = [ads_user_printxml rootElement];
[rootNode addChild:fallback_driver];

When this is run, I would like to output to be as per the commented section in the image below, not the actual XML (that is not commented).

How I can format the XML file that way? Thanks!

P.S.

Thanks for the answer.. However, I would like to convert the NSXMLDocument that I have into NSData for saving...

I am trying

NSData *newData = [[ads_user_printxml XMLDataWithOptions:NSXMLNodePrettyPrint]XMLData];

however I am getting a warning that "'NSData' may not respond to '-XMLData', where before I added the XMLDataWithOptions it was working fine. I also tried the method 'XMLStringWithOptions' (as you stated - but figured that data was more appropriate), but the same warning was generated.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

You can output a nicely formatted XML string using the following:

NSString* string = [xmlNode XMLStringWithOptions:NSXMLNodePrettyPrint];

Note that because NSXMLDocument and NSXMLElement are subclasses of NSXMLNode, you can do this with those classes also.

If you want NSData instead of a string, just do:

NSData* xmlData = [xmlNode XMLDataWithOptions:NSXMLNodePrettyPrint];