Swift GET request with parameters

Question

I'm very new to swift, so I will probably have a lot of faults in my code but what I'm trying to achieve is send a GET request to a localhost server with paramters. More so I'm trying to achieve it given my function take two parameters baseURL:string,params:NSDictionary. I am not sure how to combine those two into the actual URLRequest ? Here is what I have tried so far

    func sendRequest(url:String,params:NSDictionary){
       let urls: NSURL! = NSURL(string:url)
       var request = NSMutableURLRequest(URL:urls)
       request.HTTPMethod = "GET"
       var data:NSData! =  NSKeyedArchiver.archivedDataWithRootObject(params)
       request.HTTPBody = data
       println(request)
       var session = NSURLSession.sharedSession()
       var task = session.dataTaskWithRequest(request, completionHandler:loadedData)
       task.resume()

    }

}

func loadedData(data:NSData!,response:NSURLResponse!,err:NSError!){
    if(err != nil){
        println(err?.description)
    }else{
        var jsonResult: NSDictionary = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: NSJSONReadingOptions.MutableContainers, error: nil) as NSDictionary
        println(jsonResult)

    }

}

Answer 1

When building a GET request, there is no body to the request, but rather everything goes on the URL. To build a URL (and properly percent escaping it), you can also use URLComponents.

var url = URLComponents(string: "https://www.google.com/search/")!

url.queryItems = [
    URLQueryItem(name: "q", value: "War & Peace")
]

The only trick is that most web services need + character percent escaped (because they'll interpret that as a space character as dictated by the application/x-www-form-urlencoded specification). But URLComponents will not percent escape it. Apple contends that + is a valid character in a query and therefore shouldn't be escaped. Technically, they are correct, that it is allowed in a query of a URI, but it has a special meaning in application/x-www-form-urlencoded requests and really should not be passed unescaped.

Apple acknowledges that we have to percent escaping the + characters, but advises that we do it manually:

var url = URLComponents(string: "https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/")!

url.queryItems = [
    URLQueryItem(name: "i", value: "1+2")
]

url.percentEncodedQuery = url.percentEncodedQuery?.replacingOccurrences(of: "+", with: "%2B")

This is an inelegant work-around, but it works, and is what Apple advises if your queries may include a + character and you have a server that interprets them as spaces.

So, combining that with your sendRequest routine, you end up with something like:

func sendRequest(_ url: String, parameters: [String: String], completion: @escaping ([String: Any]?, Error?) -> Void) {
    var components = URLComponents(string: url)!
    components.queryItems = parameters.map { (key, value) in 
        URLQueryItem(name: key, value: value) 
    }
    components.percentEncodedQuery = components.percentEncodedQuery?.replacingOccurrences(of: "+", with: "%2B")
    let request = URLRequest(url: components.url!)

    let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request) { data, response, error in
        guard let data = data,                            // is there data
            let response = response as? HTTPURLResponse,  // is there HTTP response
            (200 ..< 300) ~= response.statusCode,         // is statusCode 2XX
            error == nil else {                           // was there no error, otherwise ...
                completion(nil, error)
                return
        }

        let responseObject = (try? JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: data)) as? [String: Any]
        completion(responseObject, nil)
    }
    task.resume()
}

And you'd call it like:

sendRequest("someurl", parameters: ["foo": "bar"]) { responseObject, error in
    guard let responseObject = responseObject, error == nil else {
        print(error ?? "Unknown error")
        return
    }

    // use `responseObject` here
}

Personally, I'd use JSONDecoder nowadays and return a custom struct rather than a dictionary, but that's not really relevant here. Hopefully this illustrates the basic idea of how to percent encode the parameters into the URL of a GET request.

---

See previous revision of this answer for Swift 2 and manual percent escaping renditions.