Articles and podcasts about Swift development, by John Sundell.

Genius Scan SDK

Presented by the Genius Scan SDK

This article has been archived, as it was published several years ago, so some of its information might now be outdated. For more recent articles, please visit the main article feed.

Useful Codable extensions

Published on 06 Jun 2018
Discover page available: Codable

Here's two extensions that I always add to the Encodable and Decodable protocols, which for me really make the Codable API nicer to use. By using type inference for decoding, a lot of boilerplate can be removed when the compiler is already able to infer the resulting type.

extension Encodable {
    func encoded() throws -> Data {
        return try JSONEncoder().encode(self)
    }
}

extension Data {
    func decoded<T: Decodable>() throws -> T {
        return try JSONDecoder().decode(T.self, from: self)
    }
}

let data = try user.encoded()

// By using a generic type in the decoded() method, the
// compiler can often infer the type we want to decode
// from the current context.
try userDidLogin(data.decoded())

// And if not, we can always supply the type, still making
// the call site read very nicely.
let otherUser = try data.decoded() as User
Genius Scan SDK

Swift by Sundell is brought to you by the Genius Scan SDK — Add a powerful document scanner to any mobile app, and turn scans into high-quality PDFs with one line of code. Try it today.