AFNetworking posts JSON arrays as multiple single-entry dictionaries

Question

I\'m having a similar issue to the one discussed here.

I\'m attempting to post JSON to a server.

Here\'s the Objective-C code that should work, but

Answer 1

I too had this issue recently, I had the following parameters to be sent to the server, but the "feature" array was breaking into 4 parts rather than just 2 dictionaries.

        { "description": "Temporary Description",   
          "name": "Product Name",  
          "feature": [
            {
              "fkey": "FT1",
              "fvalue": "FD1"
            },
            {
              "fkey": "FT2",
              "fvalue": "FD2"
            }   
         ] 
    }

So I changed the

AFURLRequestSerialisation.m

replaced this line in AFQueryStringPairsFromKeyAndValue(NSString *key, id value) method

[mutableQueryStringComponents addObjectsFromArray:AFQueryStringPairsFromKeyAndValue([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@[]", key], nestedValue)];

with

[mutableQueryStringComponents addObjectsFromArray:AFQueryStringPairsFromKeyAndValue([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@[%i]", key, [array indexOfObject:nestedValue]], nestedValue)];

And this did the trick. I hope this might help someone.

Answer 2

I'm using POST, so query strings are not involved. But maybe the limitation exists with POST data as well?

The limitation is not on POST, it's URL form encoding. I go on to say that you should encode as JSON, which you can do with the following configuration change to your manager:

manager.requestSerializer = [AFJSONRequestSerializer serializer];.

Also, unless you're actually constructing a multi-part request, don't use the constructingBodyWithBlock version of that method.

Answer 3

Ugly solutions are for the weak minded: How can I POST an NSArray of NSDictionaries inside an NSDictionary without problems?

The answer to this post contains all you need.

Answer 4

I just dealt with the same issue and the only solution I could find was to create a dictionary out of the array. There must be a better way, this is pretty ugly...

    NSMutableDictionary *arrayDict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
    int counter = 0;
    for (NSMutableDictionary *arrayItem in arrayToSend) {
        [arrayDict setObject:arrayItem forKey:[NSNumber numberWithInt:counter]];
        counter++;
    }

Otherwise everything got flattened sort of. I use AFJSONRequestSerializer, but that doesn't seem to matter.