Deserialize JSON / NSDictionary to Swift objects

Question

Is there a way to properly deserialize a JSON response to Swift objects resp. using DTOs as containers for fixed JSON APIs?

Something similar to http://james.newtonk

Answer 1

I am expanding upon Mohacs and Peter Kreinz's excellent answers just a bit to cover the array of like objects case where each object contains a mixture of valid JSON data types. If the JSON data one is parsing is an array of like objects containing a mixture of JSON data types, the do loop for parsing the JSON data becomes this.

// Array of parsed objects
var parsedObjects = [ParsedObject]()
do {
    let json = try NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(jsonData, options: []) as [Dictionary]
    // Loop through objects
    for dict in json {
        // ParsedObject is a single instance of an object inside the JSON data
        // Its properties are a mixture of String, Int, Double and Bool
        let parsedObject = ParsedObject()
        // Loop through key/values in object parsed from JSON
        for (key, value) in json {
            // If property exists, set the value
            if (parsedObject.respondsToSelector(NSSelectorFromString(keyName))) {
                // setValue can handle AnyObject when assigning property value
                parsedObject.setValue(keyValue, forKey: keyName)
            }
        }
        parsedObjects.append(parsedObject)
    }
} catch let error as NSError {
    print("Failed to load: \(error.localizedDescription)")
}