plist patch?

[garysweaver]

I noticed that the read_plist method in HotCocoa 0.5.1 is on the HotCocoa module as an instance method which would mean I would need to include HotCocoa in Hash, Array, etc. to call it on one of those classes, so I did the following to be sure I had both methods on Object itself:

# HotCocoa 0.5.1 puts a to_plist on Object but a from_plist on HotCocoa. Having to include HotCocoa in your object in order to call read_plist is not intuitive and
# may cause adverse effects if having to extend Hash, Array, or Object with include HotCocoa. So instead, we add the same implementation plus a few lines to support
# reading from files, etc. like from_json/from_xml in ActiveSupport implementations do. While at first Object doesn't seem an appropriate place to put this method,
# it allows any object to have a from_plist class method as a companion to the to_plist instance method, which is intuitive. Examples:
# Hash.from_plist({:data=>'mydata'}.to_plist), Array.from_plist(['x','y','z'].to_plist), AnObject.from_plist(an_object.to_plist)
class Object

 # from_plist is the same as the HotCocoa 0.5.1 version. Could remove it, but keeping it here for now, in case need to debug.
 def self.from_plist(data, mutability=:all)
   # not sure if this will work
   if data.respond_to?(:read)
     data = data.read
   end
   mutability = case mutability
     when :none
       NSPropertyListImmutable
     when :containers_only
       NSPropertyListMutableContainers
     when :all
       NSPropertyListMutableContainersAndLeaves
     else
       raise ArgumentError, "invalid mutability `#{mutability}'"
   end
   if data.is_a?(String)
     data = data.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
     if data.nil?
       raise ArgumentError, "cannot convert string `#{data}' to data"
     end
   end
   #error = Pointer.new(:object)
   result = NSPropertyListSerialization.propertyListFromData(data,
     mutabilityOption:mutability,
     format:nil,
     errorDescription:nil)
   #raise error[0] if error[0].to_s.size > 0
 end

 # NSPropertyListSerialization can only take NSData, NSString, NSNumber, NSDate, NSArray, or NSDictionary object. Container objects must also contain only these kinds of objects.
 # So you must convert everything to either these types or hashes, arrays, strings, and other simple types before to_plist.
 def to_plist(format=:xml)
   format = case format
     when :xml
       NSPropertyListXMLFormat_v1_0
     when :binary
       NSPropertyListBinaryFormat_v1_0
     when :open_step
       NSPropertyListOpenStepFormat
     else
       raise ArgumentError, "invalid format `#{format}'"
   end
   #error = Pointer.new(:object)
   data = NSPropertyListSerialization.dataFromPropertyList(self,
     format:format,
     errorDescription:nil)
   #raise error[0] if error[0].to_s.size > 0
   NSMutableString.alloc.initWithData(data, encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding)
 end

end

I also tried out those lines commented above to get the errors currently swallowed from NSPropertyListSerialization, but didn't get much out of that.

I also learned that those methods on NSPropertyListSerialization don't support nils or custom class instances, so I ended up writing some methods to convert my data into a hash containing array of hashes without any nil values in order to be able to have the to_plist and from_plist work. It would be nice if this supported custom types (custom class instances) and nils the way that activesupport's to_xml/from_xml do (I think), but I didn't have time to work out a solution to that.