Dynamically populate object properties with dictionary values

Question

In Objective-C, I have a dictionary:

firstName -> John
lastName -> Smith
age -> 34

and an object Person that has corresponding instance variables and properties (that handle memory management appropriately). I'd like to create a convenience initializer that takes a dictionary as an argument and populates all the object fields (via their properties for memory management purposes) from the dictionary keys/values, instead of manually doing something like:

obj.firstName = [dict objectForKey:@"firstName"];
obj.lastName = [dict objectForKey:@"lastName"];
obj.age = [dict objectForKey:@"age"];
....

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can use Key-Value Coding:

[obj setValuesForKeysWithDictionary:dict];

See also the documentation for -setValuesForKeysWithDictionary:.