Date parsing? about freddy

[zwaldowski]

A pull request would be welcome! I don't personally think it's out of scope, but we didn't want to be too opinionated about it yet.

Further parsing can be built as a composition out of the string family of methods, for instance:

let formatter = ...
self.dateOfBirth = try json.string("some", "key", "path", ifNotFound: true).flatMap(formatter.dateFromString)

That obviously leaves something to be desired (error handling, for one). I envisioned a ValueTransformer<In, Out> as a case-by-case alternative to everything needing to be JSONDecodable.

[getaaron]

I can open a PR for consideration. Any thoughts on special date formats we'd like to support? At a minimum, I think it'd be nice to support two common Ruby date formats ("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZZZZ" and "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss ZZZ")

[zwaldowski]

I personally think magical support for a specific format would be more confusing than opt-in support, but I won't say we wouldn't consider it.

[justin]

All the dates in our REST APIs conform to ISO8601. I feel like that's somewhat standard, but i wouldn't lose sleep if i had to pass in a format string to adopt it.

[jgallagher]

All the dates in our REST APIs conform to ISO8601. I feel like that's somewhat standard, but i wouldn't lose sleep if i had to pass in a format string to adopt it.

I would be sooooooo happy if I had that experience. Unfortunately we see all kinds of date formats in practice, including some that can't be parsed by NSDateFormatter (e.g., search for "DateTime Wire Format" for .NET 4.5). Given that, I'm not sure even a format string is an ideal solution. :-/ This is where the desire for value transformers is coming from, FWIW.

[ratkins]

We just came up with the need to turn http://example.com/foo.jpg into an NSURL-typed property on our model object, and would also like either this special-cased or some kind of value transformer as mentioned above.

[jgallagher]

For URLs, there isn't much transformation needed. Can you make NSURL conform to JSONDecodable in your project?

[ratkins]

We can without too much trouble, sure. I have a side-question on doing that though: when turning NSURL's failable initialiser into one that throws we thought using Freddy.JSON.Error. ValueNotConvertible would be the appropriate error but I wasn't sure what to give for the value parameter?

[jgallagher]

That's up to you and how you're handling/reporting errors. I'd put in the string that failed to convert. You could also define your own error case that doesn't have an associated value.

[alcarvalho]

@ratkins were you able to conform NSURL to JSONDecodable by using its failable initializer? I couldn't get it done myself.

[zwaldowski]

Closing due to inactivity. Given the advent of Codable, Freddy is in maintenance mode and only considering bug fixes at this time.