Extract value from dictionary of annoying format - ios

Question

I apologise for the title of this question. I have no idea what else to call it.
So... When calling the following:
let testData: [NSObject : AnyObject] = getTestData()
print(testData)
I get this output:
[data: {"TypeId":7,"DataList":null,"TypeName":"This is a test"}]
How would I be able to access the value 7 for the key "TypeId"?
EDIT:
Please note that it's holding { } brackets, not only [ ], thus a cast to NSDictionary is not possible as far as I have tried.
Kind regards,
Anders

Answer 1

You can achieve plist-like nested structures using Any type for dictionary values which is Swift's somewhat counterpart to Objective-C's id type but can also hold value types.
var response = Dictionary()
response["user"] = ["Login": "Power Ranger", "Password": "Mighty Morfin'"]
response["status"] = 200
Any seems to be better than AnyObject because in the above code response["status"] is of type Swift.Int, while using value type of AnyObject it is __NSCFNumber.

Answer 2

The way most people do it is to parse annoying JSON data as custom objects. That should be done as soon as you get the JSON. Ideally, data as JSON should not be used outside your communication code, example:
First, let's define a class to hold your server data:
class MyServerObject {
let typeId: Int
let typeName: String
let dataList: [AnyObject]?
init(dictionary: Dictionary<String, AnyObject>) {
let dataDictionary = dictionary["data"] as! Dictionary<String, AnyObject>
self.typeId = dataDictionary["TypeId"] as! Int
self.typeName = dataDictionary["TypeName"] as! String
self.dataList = dataDictionary["DataList"] as? [AnyObject]
}
}
Note that init method is already parsing the JSON. This doesn't have to be done in init, you could also create a static parse method that will return a new instance.
Usage:
// demo data
let jsonString = "{\"data\": {\"TypeId\":7,\"DataList\":null,\"TypeName\":\"This is a test\"}}"
let jsonData = jsonString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)!
let json = try! NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(jsonData, options: [])
// parsing
let myServerObject = MyServerObject(dictionary: json as! Dictionary<String, AnyObject>)
// now we can simply read data as properties
print(myServerObject.typeId)
print(myServerObject.typeName)
One of the good thing about this solution is that we can check the JSON format and all the properties are parsed with the correct types.
Parsing can be hierarchical, for example, if your dataList contains complex objects, let's call them DataListItem, your parsing method can parse each item separately and put them into a [DataListItem], e.g.
if let dataListJSON = dataDictionary["DataList"] as? [Dictionary<String, AnyObject>] {
self.dataList = dataListJSON.map({ DataListItem($0) })
}
Also note that when parsing as! will crash the app when the format is invalid. as? will return nil if the types don't match. as? is very useful for types that can be nil because they are parsed as NSNull instances.

Answer 3

taking in account your data ...
print(testData)
/*
[data: {
DataList = null;
TypeId = 7;
TypeName = "This is a test";
}]
*/
// DataList type should be declared somewhere
class DataList {}
// parse data or set default value, if 'key' doesn't exist
if let data = testData["data"] as? [String:AnyObject] {
let dataList = data["DataList"] as? DataList // nil
let typeId = data["TypeId"] as? Int ?? 0 // 7
let typeName = data["TypeName"] as? String ?? "" // This is test
}