How can I implement polymorphic decoding of JSON data in Swift 4?

Question

I am attempting to render a view from data returned from an API endpoint. My JSON looks (roughly) like this:

{
  \"sections\": [
    {
      \"title\": \"Feature         


        

Answer 1

A simpler version of @CodeDifferent's response, which addresses @JRG-Developer's comment. There is no need to rethink your JSON API; this is a common scenario. For each new ViewLayoutSectionItem you create, you only need to add one case and one line of code to the PartiallyDecodedItem.ItemKind enum and PartiallyDecodedItem.init(from:) method respectively.

This is not only the least amount of code compared to the accepted answer, it is more performant. In @CodeDifferent's option, you are required to initialize 2 arrays with 2 different representations of the data to get your array of ViewLayoutSectionItems. In this option, you still need to initialize 2 arrays, but get to only have one representation of the data by taking advantage of copy-on-write semantics.

Also note that it is not necessary to include ItemType in the protocol or the adopting structs (it doesn't make sense to include a string describing what type a type is in a statically typed language).

protocol ViewLayoutSectionItem {
    var id: Int { get }
    var title: String { get }
    var imageURL: URL { get }
}

struct Foo: ViewLayoutSectionItem {
    let id: Int
    let title: String
    let imageURL: URL

    let audioURL: URL
}

struct Bar: ViewLayoutSectionItem {
    let id: Int
    let title: String
    let imageURL: URL

    let videoURL: URL
    let director: String
}

private struct PartiallyDecodedItem: Decodable {
    enum ItemKind: String, Decodable {
        case foo, bar
    }
    let kind: Kind
    let item: ViewLayoutSectionItem

    private enum DecodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
        case kind = "itemType"
    }

    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: DecodingKeys.self)
        self.kind = try container.decode(Kind.self, forKey: .kind)
        self.item = try {
            switch kind {
            case .foo: return try Foo(from: decoder)
            case .number: return try Bar(from: decoder)
        }()
    }
}

struct ViewLayoutSection: Decodable {
    let title: String
    let sectionLayoutType: String
    let sectionItems: [ViewLayoutSectionItem]

    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)
        self.title = try container.decode(String.self, forKey: .title)
        self.sectionLayoutType = try container.decode(String.self, forKey: .sectionLayoutType)
        self.sectionItems = try container.decode([PartiallyDecodedItem].self, forKey: .sectionItems)
            .map { $0.item }
    }
}

To handle the snake case -> camel case conversion, rather than manually type out all of the keys, you can simply set a property on JSONDecoder

struct Sections: Decodable {
    let sections: [ViewLayoutSection]
}

let decoder = JSONDecoder()
decoder.keyDecodingStrategy = .convertFromSnakeCase
let sections = try decode(Sections.self, from: json)
    .sections