I want to have two versions of encodeWithCoder in the same class

Question

Let's say I have an object Person. (I know that Person has syntax errors. Please ignore those.)

interface StringList extends List<String> {}
Class<? extends StringList> c; OK!

My question is: Is it possible to have two separate encodeWithCoder methods..one that includes salary in the archived object, and one that does not. Something like:

class Person: NSObject, NSCoding {

    var name : String
    var salary: NSNumber


    // MARK: NSCoding

    required convenience init(coder decoder: NSCoder) {
        self.init()
        self.name = decoder.decodeObjectForKey("name") as String
        self.salary = decoder.decodeObjectForKey("salary") as NSNumber        
    }

    func encodeWithCoder(coder: NSCoder) {
        coder.encodeObject(self.name, forKey: "name")
        coder.encodeObject(self.salary, forKey: "salary")
    }

}

What's the best way to go about implementing multiple archive methods in an NSObject, as a way of limiting the fields written to the archive?

Answer 1

Rather than trying to have 2 versions of it you should figure out what it is that determines which encoding you want to use, and make that a separate flag/field and encode that too.

ord

Then you can do the same thing in func encodeWithCoder(coder: NSCoder) { coder.encodeObject(self.name, forKey: "name") if self.someFlag == true { coder.encodeObject(self.salary, forKey: "salary") } // encode flag as well } by parsing the flag first and decoding the rest of the fields based on its value.