Dynamically instanting classes in Objective-C, possible?

Question

My problem is the following. I have a method which simply takes an XML excerpt and an XPath. It then should create me an array of objects for that XML excerpt. Meaning if I get passed the following XML:

<user>   <name>Bob</name>   <age>50</age> </user> 

My method will instantiate an instance of the class User and use key-value-coding to set the instance variables. It's rather straight forward. The only problem is I come from mostly a scripting background and trying to see if it's possible to pass the method a class name. Right now it's doing a User class, later it might be a Cars class, and then a Home class. What's the best way to instantiate objects from this method of different type while keeping the code as abstract as possible?

Answer 1

For instantiating a class using its name, you can use NSClassFromString:

id obj = [[NSClassFromString(@"MySpecialClass") alloc] init];