Question

The company I’m working at is considering using RestKit. However, the JSON that our server returns is surrounded characters for security reasons. It’s a pain. In another iPhone app, one that does not use RestKit and uses JSON only very little, I parse the string returned from the server, removing the characters preceding and trailing the JSON string. Once the the string is parsed, I call JSONValue on the string (we’re using SBJSON) and get an NSDictionary.

I’ve heard that RestKit features a pluggable architecture. If that’s the case is there somewhere I can intercept the strings coming back from the server prior to the point where RestKit does its parsing?

Answer 1

I wanted to find a fix that did not require me to change the RestKit codebase in any way and I found it. The answer was to create and register my own parser.

Parsers need to conform to the RKParser protocol. Basically what I needed to do was trim the server response and not parse the response into objects – there was already a parser that did that: RKJSONParserJSONKit. So I subclassed this class and registered my parser at start up:

[[RKParserRegistry sharedRegistry] setParserClass:[MyJSONParser class] 
                                      forMIMEType:@"application/json"];