In Swift, we all deal with JSON, plists, and various forms of [String: AnyObject]. Marshal believes you don't need a Ph.D. in Monads or large, complex frameworks to deal with these in an expressive and type safe way. Marshal is a simple, lightweight framework for safely extracting values from [String: AnyObject].

Extracting values from [String: AnyObject] (a.k.a. Marshal.Object) is as easy as:

let name: String = try json.valueForKey("name")

Or, if you're into fancy high-brow operators:

let name: String = try json <| "name"

Marshal even handles pulling values out of nested objects.

let name: String = try json.valueForKey("user.name")

Don't care about errors? Use try? to give yourself an optional value. Otherwise, wrap it up into a do-catch and get all the juicy details.

Often we want to take some Marshal.Object and turn it into one of our models (like intializing a model from a JSON object). For this, Marshal offers the ObjectConvertible protocol.

struct User: ObjectConvertible {
    var id: String
    var name: String
    var email: String
    
    init(object: Object) throws {
        id = try object.valueForKey("id")
        name = try object.valueForKey("name")
        email = try object.valueForKey("email")
    }
}

Et voila! By supplying a simple initializer you can now pull your models directly out of [String: AnyObject].

let users: [User] = json.valueForKey("users")

Out of the box, Marshal supports extracting native Swift types like String, Int, etc., as well as anything conforming to ObjectConvertible, and arrays of the aforementioned types.

However, addding your own extractable type is as easy as extending your type with Marshal.ValueType.

extension NSDate : ValueType {
    public static func value(object: Any) throws -> NSDate {
        guard let dateString = object as? String else {
            throw Error.TypeMismatch(expected: String.self, actual: object.dynamicType)
        }
        // assuming you have a NSDate.fromISO8601String implemented...
        guard let date = NSDate.fromISO8601String(dateString) else {
            throw Error.TypeMismatch(expected: "ISO8601 date string", actual: dateString)
        }
        return date
    }
}

Now you can do this!

let birthDate: NSDate = json.valueForKey("user.dob")

One of the most common occurences of [String: AnyObject] are JSON objects. To this end, Marshal supplies a JSONObject typelias for Marshal.Object, and several helper functions.

Marshal began as a blog series on JSON parsing by Jason Larsen, but quickly evolved into a community project. Many people have contribued at one point or another to varying degrees with ideas and code:

• Bart Whiteley
• Brian Mullen
• Derrick Hathaway
• Dave DeLong
• Jason Larsen
• Mark Schultz
• Tim Shadel