I need to serialize and deserialize objective-c objects into JSON to store in CouchDB. Do people have any example code for best practice for a general solution? I looked at a few JSON framework and they are stopped at the NSDictionary/NSArray level. i.e. A lot of framework will serialize and deserialize NSDictionary/NSArray into JSON. But I still have to do the work to convert NSDictionary into Objective-C objects.
To make things more complex, my Object A can have reference to an NSArray/NSDictionary of Object Bs.
My question is very similar to this question with addition of the collection requirement.
It sounds like you’re looking for a serialization library that can let you convert objects of your own custom classes into JSON, and then reconstitute them back. Serialization of property-list types (NSArray, NSNumber, etc.) already exists in 3rd party libraries, and is even built into OS X 10.7 and iOS 5.
So, I think the answer is basically “no”. I asked this exact question a month or two ago on the cocoa-dev mailing list, and the closest I got to a hit was from Mike Abdullah, pointing to an experimental library he’d written:
https://github.com/mikeabdullah/KSPropertyListEncoder
This archives objects to in-memory property lists, but as I said there are already APIs for converting those into JSON.
There’s also a commercial app called Objectify that claims to be able to do something similar:
http://tigerbears.com/objectify/
It’s possible I’ll end up implementing what you’re asking for as part of my CouchCocoa library, but I haven’t dived into that task yet.
https://github.com/couchbaselabs/CouchCocoa