Note — Since the release of Swift 3, a few statements made in this article are not true for Swift 3, but they hold good for older versions of Swift.
The power of structures in Swift makes you want to use it a lot more than you would in any other language. This is a good thing, as long as you know when to use structures and when to strictly not.
One disadvantage of structures is that it cannot conform to NSCoding protocol, which requires its conformers to be of classes. This means, there’s not straight-forward way to archive and unarchive classes.
When working on a project, I needed to archive structure instances. I wrote another article about how I ended up doing it. I have been doing more research ever since and now have discovered three ways of doing it, and I like the third way the best.
Approach 1
Let’s say I have a structure Movie,
struct Movie {
let name: String
let director: String
let releaseYear: Int
}
Create a class mimicking the structure and use the class to archive and unarchive. Unarchive the class and create an instance of the structure using the class object.
class MovieClass: NSObject, NSCoding {
var movie: Movie?
required convenience init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
self.init()
if let name = aDecoder.decodeObjectForKey(“name”) as? String,
director = aDecoder.decodeObjectForKey(“director”) as? String,
releaseYear = aDecoder.decodeObjectForKey(“releaseYear”) as? Int {
movie = Movie(name: name, director: director, releaseYear: releaseYear)
}
}
func encodeWithCoder(aCoder: NSCoder) {
if let movie = movie {
aCoder.encodeObject(movie.name, forKey: “name”)
aCoder.encodeObject(movie.director, forKey: “director”)
aCoder.encodeObject(movie.releaseYear, forKey: “releaseYear”)
}
}
}
As seen above, the class MovieClass conforms to NSCoding protocol. Hence, the encodeWithCoder: and a failable initializer are defined as methods in the class. The encodeWithCoder: method assigns a key for each property of the struct movie and encodes them as individual objects. The initializer safely unwraps all three properties of the class, and only if all three are not nil, it assigns its movie property with a newly created structure instance of Movie with the obtained values.
We then have two external methods, one to archive and the other to unarchive the structure instance. Refer to the playground ArchivingSwiftStructures1 for the complete code.
func archiveMovie(movie: Movie) {
let movieClassObject = MovieClass()
movieClassObject.movie = movie
NSKeyedArchiver.archiveRootObject(movieClassObject, toFile: /* Some file path */)
}
func unarchiveMovie() -> Movie? {
let movieClassObject = NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObjectWithFile(/* Some file path */) as? MovieClass
return movieClassObject?.movie
}
This gets the work done, it’s not elegant, and can only be considered as a dirty fix because you’ve a class and a structure defined for the same kind of data to be archived and unarchived.
Approach 2
This way is not a very big improvement from the last, but, it avoids exposing the class MovieClass outside of the structure. Here, the class is utilized for the sole purpose of archiving and unarchiving the structure instance. This is ensured by defining the class in an extension of the structure. By doing this, only the structure instances gain access to the class, and hence avoiding inappropriate archiving with a similar key by any other method.
First, let’s write two more methods in our struct, Movie. Let’s have an archive and a static unarchive method.
struct Movie {
let name: String
let director: String
let releaseYear: Int
func archive() {
let movieClassObject = MovieClass(movie: self)
NSKeyedArchiver.archiveRootObject(movieClassObject, toFile: /* Some file path */)
}
static func unarchive() -> Movie? {
let movieClassObject = NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObjectWithFile(/* Some file path */) as? MovieClass
return movieClassObject?.movie
}
}
Next, we extend the struct Movie and define a class MovieClass inside the extension.
extension Movie {
class MovieClass: NSObject, NSCoding {
var movie: Movie?
init(movie: Movie) {
self.movie = movie
super.init()
}
required init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
...
}
func encodeWithCoder(aCoder: NSCoder) {
...
}
}
}
We can also make the MovieClass private, but, this requires the failable initializer and encodeWithCoder: to be tagged with @objc.
Refer to the playground ArchivingSwiftStructures2 for the complete code.
Approach 3
What we do here is define a protocol Dictionariable which contains two non-optional methods to be implemented, dictionaryRepresentation and a failable initializer.
protocol Dictionariable {
func dictionaryRepresentation() -> NSDictionary
init?(dictionaryRepresentation: NSDictionary?)
}
We use NSDictionary, instead of Dictionary, as the former does not support objects of type Any. This is required because NSKeyedUnarchiver can only perform its functions on AnyObject type and not on Any type. By using NSDictionary, we ensure we get a compiler error if an object which does not conform to AnyObject protocol is used instead of getting a silent failure during unarchiving and finding the object to be nil.
Now, let’s extend the structure Movie and conform it to Dictionariable protocol.
extension Movie: Dictionariable {
func dictionaryRepresentation() -> NSDictionary {
let representation: [String: AnyObject] = [
“name”: name,
“director”: director,
“releaseYear”: releaseYear
]
return representation
}
init?(dictionaryRepresentation: NSDictionary?) {
guard let values = dictionaryRepresentation else {return nil}
if let name = values[“name”] as? String,
director = values[“director”] as? String,
releaseYear = values[“releaseYear”] as? Int {
self.name = name
self.director = director
self.releaseYear = releaseYear
} else {
return nil
}
}
}
By implementing the above two methods, we’ve ensured that each property of the structure get’s converted into an NSDictionary which the NSKeyedUnarchiver loves. We also have a failable initializer for the structure that initializes it from the unarchived NSDictonary.
The beauty of this method comes in using generics to archive and unarchive Dictionariable-conforming structures. By using generics, we are able to archive and unarchive all structures conforming to Dictionariable. All we need to do is conform every structure that needs archiving to Dictionariable protocol and the following two methods will handle the rest.
func extractStructureFromArchive<T: Dictionariable>() -> T? {
guard let encodedDict = NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObjectWithFile(/* Some file path */) as? NSDictionary else {return nil}
return T(dictionaryRepresentation: encodedDict)
}
func archiveStructure<T: Dictionariable>(structure: T) {
let encodedValue = structure.dictionaryRepresentation()
NSKeyedArchiver.archiveRootObject(encodedValue, toFile: /* Some file path */)
}
The extractStructureFromArchive method will unarchive and return an optional instance of the Dictionariable conforming structure. The caveat is that the return type of the method is not implicitly known, so we have to explicitly typecast the variable holding the returned value, or do an ‘as’ operation.
let someMovie: Movie? = extractStructureFromArchive()
Bonus
Because we use generics, we can use the same methods to archive and unarchive nested structures. It works just like NSCoding works, as long as all the structures are Dictionariable-conforming.
struct Actor {
let name: String
let firstMovie: Movie
}
extension Actor: Dictionariable {
func dictionaryRepresentation() -> NSDictionary {
let representation: [String: AnyObject] = [
“name”: name,
“firstMovie”: firstMovie.dictionaryRepresentation(),
]
return representation
}
init?(dictionaryRepresentation: NSDictionary?) {
guard let values = dictionaryRepresentation else {return nil}
if let name = values[“name”] as? String,
let someMovie: Movie = extractStructureFromDictionary() {
self.name = name
self.firstMovie = someMovie
} else {
return nil
}
}
}
In the example above, the structure Actor has a property called firstMovie which is of type Movie structure. The above conformance of Dictionariable protocol by the Actor structure enables it to be archived and unarchived just like the struct Movie before.
Refer to the playground ArchivingSwiftStructures3 for the complete code.
Swift introduced a tremendous amount of type-safety. But, archiving and unarchiving always loses the types of the objects. Until a better way comes along to do this by supporting all of Swift’s principles, we should make do with what we have.
Go through the relevant playground files over here https://github.com/vishalvshekkar/ArchivingSwiftStructures They contain a feature-rich implementation of the same with some code showing results.
And, also check out my other projects at https://github.com/vishalvshekkar Ciao.