iphone - How do you copy a CALayer?

Question

How can you make an NSArray full of multiple instances of a CALayer (all with the same frame, contents etc)?

Background: CALayer takes a bit of overhead to create, so I would like to create a number of CALayers (all sharing the same properties) in the init method of a class (to be used later on in that class.)

Answer 1

I haven't tried this with CALayer specifically, but I know you can perform a deep-copy by taking advantage of NSCoding:

CALayer *layer = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:[NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:layer]];

I'm not sure how copying them would really help with performance, though.