Question

I have an Objective-C class that implements NSCoding. I need to return a representation of an instance of this class in the form of an NSDictionary, where the keys are the property names and the values are the property values.

How do I make this conversion in Objective-C ?

Answer 1

It should be straightforward to create an NSCoder subclass, whose encode<thing>:forKey: methods just stick the things into a dictionary, which you can then retrieve.

@implementation DriisDictCoder
{
    NSMutableDictionary * encodedDict;
}

- (void)encodeDouble: (double)v forKey: (NSString *)k {
    [codedDict addObject:[NSNumber numberWithDouble:v] forKey:k];
}

// etc.

// Custom method
- (NSDictionary *)dictForEncodedObject {
     return encodedDict;
}

@end

Then you create an instance of your coder, and send encodeWithCoder: to this object you want in a dictionary.