Question

I want to override my object’s description method to be able to print the values of all my declared properties. I know that I can do this by appending all the values to each other, one by one, but sometimes this is time consuming if you have a lot of properties.

I was wondering if there’s an easy way to do this, by getting help from the runtime powers of Objective-C?

Answer 1

Did you try this solution ?

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <objc/runtime.h>

@interface NSObject (PropertyListing)

// aps suffix to avoid namespace collsion
//   ...for Andrew Paul Sardone
- (NSDictionary *)properties_aps;

@end

@implementation NSObject (PropertyListing)

- (NSDictionary *)properties_aps {
    NSMutableDictionary *props = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
    unsigned int outCount, i;
    objc_property_t *properties = class_copyPropertyList([self class], &outCount);
    for (i = 0; i < outCount; i++) {
        objc_property_t property = properties[i];
        NSString *propertyName = [[[NSString alloc] initWithCString:property_getName(property)] autorelease];
        id propertyValue = [self valueForKey:(NSString *)propertyName];
        if (propertyValue) [props setObject:propertyValue forKey:propertyName];
    }
    free(properties);
    return props;
}

@end