Objective-C switch using objects?

Question

I'm doing some Objective-C programming that involves parsing an NSXmlDocument and populating an objects properties from the result.

First version looked like this:

if([elementName compare:@"companyName"] == 0) 
  [character setCorporationName:currentElementText]; 
else if([elementName compare:@"corporationID"] == 0) 
  [character setCorporationID:currentElementText]; 
else if([elementName compare:@"name"] == 0) 
  ...

But I don't like the if-else-if-else pattern this produces. Looking at the switch statement I see that i can only handle ints, chars etc and not objects... so is there a better implementation pattern I'm not aware of?

BTW I did actually come up with a better solution for setting the object's properties, but I want to know specifically about the if-else vs switch pattern in Objective-C

Answer 1

You should take advantage of Key-Value Coding:

[character setValue:currentElementText forKey:elementName];

If the data is untrusted, you might want to check that the key is valid:

if (![validKeysCollection containsObject:elementName])
    // Exception or error

Answer 2

I hope you'll all forgive me for going out on a limb here, but I would like to address the more general question of parsing XML documents in Cocoa without the need of if-else statements. The question as originally stated assigns the current element text to an instance variable of the character object. As jmah pointed out, this can be solved using key-value coding. However, in a more complex XML document this might not be possible. Consider for example the following.

<xmlroot>
    <corporationID>
        <stockSymbol>EXAM</stockSymbol>
        <uuid>31337</uuid>
    </corporationID>
    <companyName>Example Inc.</companyName>
</xmlroot>

There are multiple approaches to dealing with this. Off of the top of my head, I can think of two using NSXMLDocument. The first uses NSXMLElement. It is fairly straightforward and does not involve the if-else issue at all. You simply get the root element and go through its named elements one by one.

NSXMLElement* root = [xmlDocument rootElement];

// Assuming that we only have one of each element.
[character setCorperationName:[[[root elementsForName:@"companyName"] objectAtIndex:0] stringValue]];

NSXMLElement* corperationId = [root elementsForName:@"corporationID"];
[character setCorperationStockSymbol:[[[corperationId elementsForName:@"stockSymbol"] objectAtIndex:0] stringValue]];
[character setCorperationUUID:[[[corperationId elementsForName:@"uuid"] objectAtIndex:0] stringValue]];

The next one uses the more general NSXMLNode, walks through the tree, and directly uses the if-else structure.

// The first line is the same as the last example, because NSXMLElement inherits from NSXMLNode
NSXMLNode* aNode = [xmlDocument rootElement];
while(aNode = [aNode nextNode]){
    if([[aNode name] isEqualToString:@"companyName"]){
        [character setCorperationName:[aNode stringValue]];
    }else if([[aNode name] isEqualToString:@"corporationID"]){
        NSXMLNode* correctParent = aNode;
        while((aNode = [aNode nextNode]) == nil && [aNode parent != correctParent){
            if([[aNode name] isEqualToString:@"stockSymbol"]){
                [character setCorperationStockSymbol:[aNode stringValue]];
            }else if([[aNode name] isEqualToString:@"uuid"]){
                [character setCorperationUUID:[aNode stringValue]];
            }
        }
    }
}

This is a good candidate for eliminating the if-else structure, but like the original problem, we can't simply use switch-case here. However, we can still eliminate if-else by using performSelector. The first step is to define the a method for each element.

- (NSNode*)parse_companyName:(NSNode*)aNode
{
    [character setCorperationName:[aNode stringValue]];
    return aNode;
}

- (NSNode*)parse_corporationID:(NSNode*)aNode
{
    NSXMLNode* correctParent = aNode;
    while((aNode = [aNode nextNode]) == nil && [aNode parent != correctParent){
        [self invokeMethodForNode:aNode prefix:@"parse_corporationID_"];
    }
    return [aNode previousNode];
}

- (NSNode*)parse_corporationID_stockSymbol:(NSNode*)aNode
{
    [character setCorperationStockSymbol:[aNode stringValue]];
    return aNode;
}

- (NSNode*)parse_corporationID_uuid:(NSNode*)aNode
{
    [character setCorperationUUID:[aNode stringValue]];
    return aNode;
}

The magic happens in the invokeMethodForNode:prefix: method. We generate the selector based on the name of the element, and perform that selector with aNode as the only parameter. Presto bango, we've eliminated the need for an if-else statement. Here's the code for that method.

- (NSNode*)invokeMethodForNode:(NSNode*)aNode prefix:(NSString*)aPrefix
{
    NSNode* ret = nil;
    NSString* methodName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@:", prefix, [aNode name]];
    SEL selector = NSSelectorFromString(methodName);
    if([self respondsToSelector:selector])
        ret = [self performSelector:selector withObject:aNode];
    return ret;
}

Now, instead of our larger if-else statement (the one that differentiated between companyName and corporationID), we can simply write one line of code

NSXMLNode* aNode = [xmlDocument rootElement];
while(aNode = [aNode nextNode]){
    aNode = [self invokeMethodForNode:aNode prefix:@"parse_"];
}

Now I apologize if I got any of this wrong, it's been a while since I've written anything with NSXMLDocument, it's late at night and I didn't actually test this code. So if you see anything wrong, please leave a comment or edit this answer.

However, I believe I have just shown how properly-named selectors can be used in Cocoa to completely eliminate if-else statements in cases like this. There are a few gotchas and corner cases. The performSelector: family of methods only takes 0, 1, or 2 argument methods whose arguments and return types are objects, so if the types of the arguments and return type are not objects, or if there are more than two arguments, then you would have to use an NSInvocation to invoke it. You have to make sure that the method names you generate aren't going to call other methods, especially if the target of the call is another object, and this particular method naming scheme won't work on elements with non-alphanumeric characters. You could get around that by escaping the XML element names in your method names somehow, or by building an NSDictionary using the method names as the keys and the selectors as the values. This can get pretty memory intensive and end up taking a longer time. performSelector dispatch like I described is pretty fast. For very large if-else statements, this method may even be faster than an if-else statement.