Welcome to the Working with JSON workshop! We’re excited to help you on your journey to becoming an iOS developer! 🥳

In this stage of developing the AggieEats App, we will learn how to incorporate JSON into our application. This will allow us to efficiently load a large amount of data from a single file.

If you haven’t already, make sure you have Xcode 16 or higher on your Mac (instructions on how to download Xcode are in the developer-resources channel on our discord).

Then, download the starter code from our GitHub Repository down below and open the AggieEats.xcodeproj file with Xcode.

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GitHub - Swift-Coding-Club-UCD/BuildingYourFirstiOSApp

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Understanding JSON for Swift

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data format used to structure and transmit data. In Swift, JSON is commonly used for storing structured data like menus, user information, or API responses.

Swift makes handling JSON easy with its Codable protocol, which allows us to encode and decode JSON objects into Swift models effortlessly.

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Modeling JSON Data in Swift

Create a Model

Let’s import the OrderedCollections framework, which enables us to use ordered data structures such as an OrderedDictionary. Make sure to also add the OrderedCollections package using the Swift Package Manager.

Now, we can make a Menu struct that conforms to Codable protocol so that Swift knows how to convert JSON into a Menu object. This struct also conforms to the Hashable protocol so that we can iterate over the menu for each weekday of the week.

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//
//  MenuModel.swift
//  AggieEats
//

import Foundation
import OrderedCollections

struct Menu : Codable, Hashable {
    let id = UUID()
    let day: String
    let locationName: String
    let coordinate: [Double]
    let menu: OrderedDictionary<String, [String]>
}

Table of Contents

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Understanding JSON for Swift

Modeling JSON Data in Swift

Create a Model

Decoding JSON Files