NSNull handling for NSManagedObject properties values

Question

I\'m setting values for properties of my NSManagedObject, these values are coming from a NSDictionary properly serialized from a JSON file. My problem

Answer 1

I wrote a couple of category methods to strip nulls from a JSON-generated dictionary or array prior to use:

@implementation NSMutableArray (StripNulls)

- (void)stripNullValues
{
    for (int i = [self count] - 1; i >= 0; i--)
    {
        id value = [self objectAtIndex:i];
        if (value == [NSNull null])
        {
            [self removeObjectAtIndex:i];
        }
        else if ([value isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]] ||
                 [value isKindOfClass:[NSDictionary class]])
        {
            if (![value respondsToSelector:@selector(setObject:forKey:)] &&
                ![value respondsToSelector:@selector(addObject:)])
            {
                value = [value mutableCopy];
                [self replaceObjectAtIndex:i withObject:value];
            }
            [value stripNullValues];
        }
    }
}

@end


@implementation NSMutableDictionary (StripNulls)

- (void)stripNullValues
{
    for (NSString *key in [self allKeys])
    {
        id value = [self objectForKey:key];
        if (value == [NSNull null])
        {
            [self removeObjectForKey:key];
        }
        else if ([value isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]] ||
                 [value isKindOfClass:[NSDictionary class]])
        {
            if (![value respondsToSelector:@selector(setObject:forKey:)] &&
                ![value respondsToSelector:@selector(addObject:)])
            {
                value = [value mutableCopy];
                [self setObject:value forKey:key];
            }
            [value stripNullValues];
        }
    }
}

@end

It would be nice if the standard JSON parsing libs had this behaviour by default - it's almost always preferable to omit null objects than to include them as NSNulls.