There also is a protocol, an agreed data format expected on the receiver side. Serialization is the way to convert the objects the first system uses in its operation activity into this agreed format. And then it doesn’t matter how this data supposed to be used: stored or passed somewhere it’s another separate processes. Let’s take a look at the most popular formats and different ways of handling serialization in iOS development. NSCoding is lightweight ObjC protocol with two methods: -initWithCoder: and encodeWithCoder: which has been around since iOS 2. Your custom classes implement it to be ready for serialization/deserialization. Inside the implementation of this methods you specify how different properties of your object (the values inside these properties) are being encoded into some kind of key-value container. You describe how your object supposed to be transferred into key-value pairs.Eventually some coder will serialise this container to binary data. The implementation of the encoding method usually looks pretty much the same:įunc encodeWithCoder ( coder : NSCoder ) free ( properties ) Here we get a list of all the properties of a given class with some attributes including the property type. So we can generalise the algorithm to serialise every object into JSON data.

Optionally we can use some mapping tables and transformations if exact keys or values of the object properties are not what we want to see in JSON.

Objective c to swift converter