Question

I’m trying to send a JSON request using AFNetworking and have a problem with making values be translated to the json form of {"value": true}. Instead, I’m getting: {"value": 1}

Here’s basically how I’m creating the request:

NSMutableURLRequest *request =
    [self.httpClient requestWithMethod:@"POST"
                                  path:url
                            parameters:@{@"value": @YES}];

AFJSONRequestOperation *operation =
    [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request ...];
    [operation start];

Am I missing something trivial here? 🙂

Answer 1

Short answer:
Make sure you are running a recent version of AFNetworking. That’s all I can see as the problem based on the code you’ve provided.

Long answer:
I’ve tried reproducing the issue you’re describing with the most recent versions of AFNetworking and I could not. I dug into AFNetworking to see how the encoding of JSON is done. AFHTTPClient.m:442 uses NSJSONSerialization to encode JSON requests. I came up with the following code to test the issue:

NSError* error = nil;
NSData* jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:@{@"value" : @YES} options:0 error:&error];
NSLog(@"Resulting JSON:\n\n%@\n", [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);

outputs:

{"value":true}

So @YES should do it. As a note, be sure not to use @(YES) in your code as it will output as a 1 instead of true.

NSError* error = nil;
NSData* jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:@{@"value" : @(YES)} options:0 error:&error];
NSLog(@"JSON:%@", [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);

outputs:

{"value":1}

With that I went through and tried to figure out how AFHTTPClient need to be configured to send out a bool as 1/0 instead of true/false and could not find any. Here’s my networking code.

AFHTTPClient* httpClient = [[AFHTTPClient alloc] initWithBaseURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://<SERVER HERE>"]];
[httpClient setParameterEncoding:AFJSONParameterEncoding];
NSMutableURLRequest *jsonRequest = [httpClient requestWithMethod:@"POST" path:@"/" parameters:@{@"value": @YES}];

AFHTTPRequestOperation *jsonOperation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:jsonRequest success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) {
    NSLog(@"Success");
} failure:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, NSError *error, id JSON) {
    NSLog(@"Failure");
}];
[jsonOperation start];