Ever tried to parse JSON in swift? I know! right, the sheer magnitude of boilerplate with so many nil checks makes it a really bad experience.
I am here to provide you a solution to this problem with the newly introduced Swift 4, with it Apple has finally answered the question of parsing JSON painlessly.
Let’s take a basic JSON structure
Our swift mapping model will look something like this:
And to convert this JSON data to our model, this is literally all the code that we have to write
You can encode this model to JSON as well
Great!! isn’t it?
I have marked the Person model as Codable, which is a combination of two unidirectional protocols Encodable & Decodable
. So, if you only want to encode or decode, you can just adopt the appropriate protocol.
But, Codable
comes with default implementation and you can adopt this protocol to get free implementation.
There’s a catch! Name of the variable in your model should match the key name in JSON.
Whaaaat… Life’s not fair, most APIs are based on snake case naming 😢. Well, relax…
Key names are automatically generated by the compiler in a CodingKeys
enumeration which conforms to CodingKey
protocol. It defines how we can connect a property to a value.
So, to customise the key, we’ll have to write our own implementation of CodingKeys
and there we can provide String
values for keys that you want to change.
Let’s take an example, consider this JSON
Here’s how our model will look like
Well, that’s it 👍🏻
Swift Encoder & Decoder use this CodingKeys
enum as a lookup and matches the corresponding JSON keys to Model variables.
Also, since
String
enums are implicitly assigned raw values as each case’s name, we only need to provide raw values for problematic cases.
But wait, what about Objects or Wrappers?
Let’s assume our JSON is
Here, you have to make sure your Film
object also conforms to Codable
and that’s basically it. Here, have a looksee.
What about root level arrays? Any easy way to decode if our JSON comes wrapped in an array. Well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ take this JSON for instance.
All you have to write is this,
😬
Well, get your life together ^.~
In swift though,
Since JSON has no data type to represent dates, that information is serialised in either ISO 8601, the number of seconds from reference date or some custom format. It was then handled using String
and converted to a Date
using DateFormatter. Ugh! I Know!!
The good news is, now you can decode the date string from JSON right into the model using JSONDecoder
. Checkity check it
Same goes for Encoder
too. Apart from these strategies, you can even use custom encoder and decoder
custom((Decoder) throws -> Date) //For Decodingcustom((Date, Encoder) throws -> Void) //For Encoding
I know, I know, an example would be good. Here
You might encounter Data
in your JSON as base64 encoded strings and to handle this JSONEncoder
gives these two strategies
.base64.custom((Data, Encoder) throws -> Void)
Same goes for JSONDecoder
too.
When it comes to URL
, just replace the data type from String
to URL
and that’s it
Well, this doesn’t happen often but sometimes JSON might contain an invalid “NaN”, “+Infinity” or “-Infinity”. These are not recognised in Swift!
Normally your decoder will throw an error if you do not provide an implementation to handle this non-conformity. Just write
Similarly, this can be done with JSONEncoder
as well.
Wait, but what about unidirectional conformance? There is no default implementation for that! I’ll show you, it’s really cool
Sometimes you might just want to conform to either Encodable
or Decodable
and work from there. But, before that, we need to understand the concept of containers. These are some types of containers:
Now, all you have to do is guide the compiler how you want the data to be decoded and that’s it. Have a look
Let’s assume we have the following JSON, now we can make a nested model or we can do this:
Since movie name and director name comes nested in a container, we can use the nested container property of decoder to extract the values and use in corresponding keys. Here, I am extracting the "film"
object to the filmInfo
container and then use it to decode values in movieName
and director
keys.
Similarly, for Encoder
, we take our movieName
and director
keys and encode them in the filmInfo
container and this will return the exact JSON as before. That’s the power of coding keys.
You won’t need this as often but you can parse your JSON in a dictionary or an enumeration too.
Consider the following JSON
Can you identify any similarity between these objects? Both "Death Star" & "Millennium Falcon"
nests a model inside. Let’s see what we can make of this
Let’s take in a straight dive with this JSON
Yeah! that’s one weird JSON, but it’ll do the trick. Let’s have a look at our code
Congrats! You have successfully parsed your JSON to enum cases.
Till now, all we used was a simple catch
as a panacea, but there are some known cases that we can catch and handle accordingly.
context
.CodingKey
will give you the problematic key and context
will give you information about where and what happened.context
and type
to know what happened.Have a look
Same goes for Encoder
, these errors are very helpful in giving you the flexibility to adapt to certain situations and handle them appropriately.
There is nothing better than the WWDC 2017 resource themselves. Here…
What's New in Foundation - WWDC 2017 - Videos - Apple Developer_Whether you're building apps for iOS, macOS, watchOS, or tvOS, a lot of the functionality you get from Apple's SDKs…_developer.apple.com
Using JSON with Custom Types | Apple Developer Documentation_JSON data you send or receive from other apps, services, and files can come in many different shapes and structures…_developer.apple.com
Whoot! This was a looong ride, but this is the future of Swift JSON parsing. Comments/Suggestions are welcome :)