I'm new to Swift and iOS development in general. I'm testing and learning how to use remote server api's. I'm getting JSON from a Strongloop (Loopback) api while attempting authentication and the parsing I'm trying to use gets an error:
Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (Cocoa error 3840.)" (No value.) UserInfo=0x7fd623e38870 {NSDebugDescription=No value.}
Here is the return value in a string, I'm obviously getting a proper JSON response from Loopback, an authentication token, ttl, date and userId:
{"id":"BHzKnjrbUPn9KSC1GegQTNHJFNwfuifNXPfZuKkYxC5IwRDEHuerurvSdBMzzrVi","ttl":1209600,"created":"2015-07-03T13:04:39.791Z","userId":2}
I think the actual problem is NOT occurring in the parseJSON method but rather the performLoginRequestWithURL method. It's returning an empty string. Something to do with the asynchronous request. I noticed that the json string variable does not get set until after it's returned from the method, so it gets returned blank. If I put two println(json) methods, one inside the asynchronous request and one after it, the one after prints first. Which makes sense in a way but I don't know how to solve this. I need to get the json returned from the post but I don't know how to capture that. Something tells me I need to use a synchronous request instead but I don't know how to do that in this context of getting json from a POST request.
Here is my code:
//Login button pressed
@IBAction func login() {
//Gets url string
let url = getLogin()
//Posts url with UITextField data.
if let jsonString = performLoginRequestWithURL(url) {
//Error occurs in the parseJSON method
if let dictionary = parseJSON(jsonString) {
/*
if let at = dictionary["id"] as? String {
accesstoken = at
}
if let id = dictionary["userId"] as? Int {
println(id)
}
*/
}
}
}
func getLogin() -> NSURL {
let toEscape = "http://localhost:3000/api/Users/login"
let urlString = toEscape.stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)!
let url = NSURL(string: urlString)
return url!
}
func performLoginRequestWithURL(url: NSURL) -> String? {
let bodyData = "username=\(textEmail.text)&password=\(textPW.text)"
var request: NSMutableURLRequest = NSMutableURLRequest(URL: url)
var json = ""
request.HTTPMethod = "POST"
request.HTTPBody = bodyData.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, queue: NSOperationQueue.mainQueue()){
response, data, error in
if data != nil {
json = NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) as! String
}
println(json)
}
return json
}
func parseJSON(jsonString: String) -> [String: AnyObject]? {
if let data = jsonString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding) {
var error: NSError?
if let json = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: NSJSONReadingOptions(0), error: &error) as? [String: AnyObject] {
return json
} else if let error = error {
//Here's where the error comes back.
println("JSON Error: \(error)")
} else {
println("Unknown JSON Error")
}
}
return nil
}
I tested parseJSON
with the string from the question and it succeeded so the error must be that the string is not being sent to the parseJSON
method correctly.
let jsonString = "{\"id\":\"BHzKnjrbUPn9KSC1GegQTNHJFNwfuifNXPfZuKkYxC5IwRDEHuerurvSdBMzzrVi\",\"ttl\":1209600,\"created\":\"2015-07-03T13:04:39.791Z\",\"userId\":2}"
println("jsonString:\n\(jsonString)")
func parseJSON(jsonString: String) -> [String: AnyObject]? {
if let data = jsonString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding) {
var error: NSError?
if let json = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: NSJSONReadingOptions(0), error: &error) as? [String: AnyObject] {
return json
} else if let error = error {
println("JSON Error: \(error)")
} else {
println("Unknown JSON Error")
}
}
return nil
}
let obj = parseJSON(jsonString)
println("obj:\n\(obj!)")
Output:
jsonString: {"id":"BHzKnjrbUPn9KSC1GegQTNHJFNwfuifNXPfZuKkYxC5IwRDEHuerurvSdBMzzrVi","ttl":1209600,"created":"2015-07-03T13:04:39.791Z","userId":2}
obj: [created: 2015-07-03T13:04:39.791Z, userId: 2, ttl: 1209600, id: BHzKnjrbUPn9KSC1GegQTNHJFNwfuifNXPfZuKkYxC5IwRDEHuerurvSdBMzzrVi]
Some what the lesson is to create a small self-contained test—or write Unit Tests.