Swift HTTP POST 2D array - arrays

Question

The question is: in which format to send this array to remote URL? JSON or as array?
Is it possible to send it as simple array?
What I want to do is, to send 2d array to url. The array looks like following:
[
"deviceID" => "123456789"
"answers" => array(
1=>"a",
2=>"b"
...
)
]
Now a bit of code:
I have the following Dictionary:
var postJSON = [ids[0]:answersArray[0], ids[1]:answersArray[1], ids[2]:answersArray[2]] as Dictionary => [2: B, 1: B, 3: B]
Now, I want to create another Dictionary, like: ["deviceID", "123456789"], later concatenate these two Dictionaries onto one and JSON encode the result array.
How can I realize it?
For the POST I use:
var URL: NSURL = NSURL(string: "http://example.com/en/check-answers")!
var request:NSMutableURLRequest = NSMutableURLRequest(URL:URL)
request.HTTPMethod = "POST"
var bodyData = // a JSON encode here
request.HTTPBody = bodyData.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding);
NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, queue: NSOperationQueue.mainQueue())
{
(response, data, error) in
println(NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding))
}

Answer 1

You can just build a new dictionary using your answers object and the deviceID key/value pair:
let answers = ["a", "b", "c"] // build this any way you want
let device = "123456789"
let payload = ["answers" : answers, "deviceID" : device]
let body = try! NSJSONSerialization.dataWithJSONObject(payload, options: [])
let request = NSMutableURLRequest(URL: URL)
request.HTTPMethod = "POST"
request.setValue("application/json", forHTTPHeaderField: "Content-Type")
request.HTTPBody = body
// now issue request
That creates JSON that looks like:
{"answers":["a","b","c"],"deviceID":"123456789"}
If you want to see it as the server gets it, you could have PHP code that takes that and prints it:
<?
$handle = fopen("php://input", "rb");
$raw_post_data = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
$raw_post_data .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
$body = json_decode($raw_post_data, true);
header("Content-Type: text/plain");
print_r($body);
?>
It looks like:
Array
(
[answers] => Array
(
[0] => a
[1] => b
[2] => c
)
[deviceID] => 123456789
)
Obviously, I wouldn't generally do print_r or var_dump, but rather would build a JSON response (set application/json for the Content-Type header, use json_encode to build response, etc.), but I wanted to show the associative array in more of a native PHP syntax. But hopefully this illustrates the idea, nonetheless.
By the way, if you wanted to really represent answers, itself, as a dictionary, you can do that, too, e.g.:
let answers = ["1" : "a", "2" : "b", "3" : "c"]
Just notice that the keys, 1, 2, and 3 must be strings, not numbers (it's a constraint of JSON, not of dictionaries in Swift).
Anyway, the resulting JSON would look like
{"answers":{"2":"b","1":"a","3":"c"},"deviceID":"123456789"}
And in PHP, that would look like:
Array
(
[answers] => Array
(
[2] => b
[1] => a
[3] => c
)
[device] => 123456789
)