Converting NSDictionary to XML

Question

I need to Post data in XML format. The server accepts a specific xml format. I don\'t want to write the xml by hand, what i want to do is create a NSMutableDictionary<

Answer 1

The short answer is: No, there is no built-in ability to do this in the Cocoa libraries.

Because you're writing rather than parsing, and presumably dealing with a limited universe of possible tags, the code to output XML is actually not that complicated. It should just be a simple method in your Invoice object, something like:

- (NSString*) postStringInXMLFormat
{
    NSMutableString* returnValue = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];
    if([self email])
    {
        [returnValue appendString:@""];
        [returnValue appendString:[self email]];
        [returnValue appendString:@""];
    }
    if([self invoice_date])
    ...

and so on. At the end return

[NSString stringWithString:returnValue]

There are plenty of third-party projects out there that try to generalize this process; several of them are listed in this answer:

Xml serialization library for iPhone Apps

But if all you're looking to do is create a single, stable format that your server side will recognize, and you don't have a ridiculous number of entities to convert, it's probably less work to roll your own.