Which objective-c type is appropriate for handling money?

Question

Which objective-c type is appropriate for handling money? I need something which is Core Data compatible.

Answer 1

There are two solutions:

• Use an int, and always keep track of monetary values in cents (or the smallest possible division of whatever currency you're using). Use only integer calculations.
• Use NSDecimalNumber, which does exact decimal arithmetic.

Solution #1 requires you to convert between cents and dollars whenever you do input or output of monetary values, whereas solution #2 can be messier to code (e.g. you have to write something like [num1 decimalNumberByAdding:num2] instead of num1 + num2 to add two numbers).

I'd recommend solution #1, but go with whichever of those you think would work best.