Although I don't know exactly what the implications are just yet, I've created a category on one of my RLMObject subclasses which accepts an NSArray or NSDictionary property and in the getter/setter converts to and from the NSData backing property. The only thing is after [Venue creatInDefaultRealmWithObject:] I have to explicity set the value for it to propogate to the backing NSData property.
It's extra work, but it lets me manipulate Realm into doing what I want it to do to store data which doesn't conform to an explicit schema. (e.g. a Venue which has an array of address strings, where I don't want the headache of iterating through venue.address[i].string values:
(note: this doesn't look pretty, its doing some funky formatting!)
"venue" : {
"name":"Test Venue",
"address" : [
"address line 1",
"address line 2",
"address line 3 for rare instances"
]
}
@interface Venue : RLMObject
@property NSString name;
@property NSData addressData;
@end
@interface Venue (AddressToData)
@property NSArray address;
@end
+ (NSDictionary )defaultPropertyValues
{
return @{
@"addressData":[NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:@[] options:0 error:nil]
};
}
- (NSArray) address {
NSArray address = nil;
if (self.addressData) {
address = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:self.addressData options:0 error:nil];
} else {
address = @[];
}
return address;
}
- (void) setAddress:(NSArray )address {
if (!address) {
address = @[];
}
NSData *data = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:address options:0 error:nil];
self.addressData = data;
}