How to store NSCoding data using Codable

Swift version: 5.10

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

Broadly speaking, NSCoding is the Objective-C way of archiving data and Codable is the Swift way. However, that doesn’t mean the two can’t work together – with a little work you can save any NSCoding data right inside Codable, which is helpful because many Apple types such as UIColor and UIImage conform to NSCoding but not Codable.

Here’s a simple struct as an example:

struct Person {
    var name: String
    var favoriteColor: UIColor
}

That stores one Codable type (the string) and one NSCoding type (the color), and we’re going to make them all work through Codable using JSONEncoder.

This takes four steps:

Creating an extension on Person where we’ll put our Codable functionality.
Creating custom coding keys to describe what data is saved.
Creating an init(from:) method that converts raw data back into a UIColor.
Creating an encode(to:) method that converts a UIColor into raw data, which Codable can then base-64 encode.

Start by adding the extension to Person:

extension Person: Codable {

}

That will stop your code from compiling because Swift knows UIColor isn’t compatible with Codable. So, let’s move on to step two: adding custom coding keys. Put this inside the extension:

enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
    case name
    case favoriteColor
}

Those are just the same coding keys we’d get by default, but because we’re going to be encoding and decoding things by hand we need to declare them explicitly.

Step three is to create an init(from:) method that can read raw data and convert it to a UIColor. This will used NSKeyedUnarchiver just like regular NSCoding code. Add this to the extension:

init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
    let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)

    name = try container.decode(String.self, forKey: .name)

    let colorData = try container.decode(Data.self, forKey: .favoriteColor)
    favoriteColor = try NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveTopLevelObjectWithData(colorData) as? UIColor ?? UIColor.black
}

The last step is to create an encode(to:) method that does the opposite – it takes a UIColor and converts it to data using NSKeyedArchiver. Put this inside the extension:

func encode(to encoder: Encoder) throws {
    var container = encoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)
    try container.encode(name, forKey: .name)

    let colorData = try NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData(withRootObject: favoriteColor, requiringSecureCoding: false)
    try container.encode(colorData, forKey: .favoriteColor)
}

That’s all the work done – by converting our UIColor into a Data, Codable can take care of the rest.

If you want to try it out, here’s some sample code:

let taylor = Person(name: "Taylor Swift", favoriteColor: .blue)
let encoder = JSONEncoder()

do {
    let encoded = try encoder.encode(taylor)
    let str = String(decoding: encoded, as: UTF8.self)
    print(str)
} catch {
    print(error.localizedDescription)
}