What is wrong with this line of Swift iOS Code? - ios

Question

I have created an iOS app using Swift and everything is working fine and dandy on the simulator. I get no errors or crashes at all, but when I submit my app to put up on the app store Apple rejects it and lets me know that it crashes when the user makes a selection. I cannot recreate this error/crash. I took the crash logs and symbolicated them. This line of code came up as the culprit for the crashes:
linksToPass = getLinks(season) as [String:[String]]
This line is trying to store the resulting Dictionary from the getLinks() function I created. It for sure is getting a dictionary and if there is no dictionary to send back I create a dictionary which has error information in it, so it is for sure returning a dictionary in that format no matter what. Seeing as I cannot recreate the crash, I am just trying to error check this line of code in any way possible so it does't crash when I resubmit to Apple.
I tried checking if the resulting dictionary was nil like so:
if(getLinks(seasons) != nil){
linksToPass = getLinks(season) as [String:[String]]
}
This is not valid though, and XCode lets me know that UInt8 is not compatible with NSDictionary or something of that nature.
I then fixed that line and changed it to this:
if(getLinks(seasons) != ["":[""]]){
linksToPass = getLinks(season) as [String:[String]]
}
I am just not sure if this is even a good way to check for errors. I was wondering if there were any suggestions on how I may go about making sure this line does not fail and result in a crash. Thank you very much.
EDIT:
Here is my getLinks() function if that helps add more info to the problem:
var season = ""
let hymn_links = Hymn_Links()
func getLinks (nameofseason:String) -> NSDictionary
{
switch (nameofseason)
{
default:
return ["Maps Not Found": []]
}
}
EDIT #2:
This is my updated getLinks() function with the use of optionals.
func getLinks (nameofseason:String) -> NSDictionary?
{
switch (nameofseason)
{
default:
return nil
}
}
Also in my statement of linksToPass I changed it to:
if let links = getLinks(season) as? [String:[String]]
{
linksToPass = links
hymnnames = [String] (linksToPass.keys)
}

Answer 1

There are some known issues with the Swift optimiser. Some people have resorted to shipping with debug builds.
My suggestion would be to test with an optimised build to see if you can reproduce it. You can then try shipping a debug build to the App store.
General Code Comments
Why are you returning an NSDictionary rather than a Swift dictionary anyway? Without knowing the contents and creation method for your hymn_links object I can't be sure how good it is.
I would avoid as casts until Swift 1.2 and stick to using as? and then handling the nil case. At least in your "Edit 2" a nil will cause a crash as nil cannot be cast to [String:[String]] although [String:[String]]? should be possible.

Answer 2

Can you guarantee that all of the items returned by the switch statement will never under any circumstances be nil? If not getLinks should return an Optional.
Note that is is virtually impossible for getLinks to know that one of the items will never be nil and in Swift un-handed nils are a crash waiting to happen. Unless all these methods correctly handle nil.
Return an Optional and handle that in the statement that calls getLinks.
Languages handle nils differently, Objective-C handles them rather well, Java and Swift by crashing. But Swift has a mechanism to handle nils without crashing: Optionals, use it.