How to decode the body of an error in Alamofire 5? - swift

Question

I'm trying to migrate my project from Alamofire 4.9 to 5.3 and I'm having a hard time with error handling. I would like to use Decodable as much as possible, but my API endpoints return one JSON structure when everything goes well, and a different JSON structure when there is an error, the same for all errors across all endpoints. The corresponding Codable in my code is ApiError.
I would like to create a custom response serializer that can give me a Result<T, ApiError> instead of the default Result<T, AFError>. I found this article that seems to explain the general process but the code in there does not compile.
How can I create such a custom ResponseSerializer?

Answer 1

I ended up making it work with the following ResponseSerializer:
struct APIError: Error, Decodable {
let message: String
let code: String
let args: [String]
}
final class TwoDecodableResponseSerializer<T: Decodable>: ResponseSerializer {
lazy var decoder: JSONDecoder = {
let decoder = JSONDecoder()
decoder.dateDecodingStrategy = .iso8601
return decoder
}()
private lazy var successSerializer = DecodableResponseSerializer<T>(decoder: decoder)
private lazy var errorSerializer = DecodableResponseSerializer<APIError>(decoder: decoder)
public func serialize(request: URLRequest?, response: HTTPURLResponse?, data: Data?, error: Error?) throws -> Result<T, APIError> {
guard error == nil else { return .failure(APIError(message: "Unknown error", code: "unknown", args: [])) }
guard let response = response else { return .failure(APIError(message: "Empty response", code: "empty_response", args: [])) }
do {
if response.statusCode < 200 || response.statusCode >= 300 {
let result = try errorSerializer.serialize(request: request, response: response, data: data, error: nil)
return .failure(result)
} else {
let result = try successSerializer.serialize(request: request, response: response, data: data, error: nil)
return .success(result)
}
} catch(let err) {
return .failure(APIError(message: "Could not serialize body", code: "unserializable_body", args: [String(data: data!, encoding: .utf8)!, err.localizedDescription]))
}
}
}
extension DataRequest {
#discardableResult func responseTwoDecodable<T: Decodable>(queue: DispatchQueue = DispatchQueue.global(qos: .userInitiated), of t: T.Type, completionHandler: #escaping (Result<T, APIError>) -> Void) -> Self {
return response(queue: .main, responseSerializer: TwoDecodableResponseSerializer<T>()) { response in
switch response.result {
case .success(let result):
completionHandler(result)
case .failure(let error):
completionHandler(.failure(APIError(message: "Other error", code: "other", args: [error.localizedDescription])))
}
}
}
}
And with that, I can call my API like so:
AF.request(request).validate().responseTwoDecodable(of: [Item].self) { response in
switch response {
case .success(let items):
completion(.success(items))
case .failure(let error): //error is an APIError
log.error("Error while loading items: \(String(describing: error))")
completion(.failure(.couldNotLoad(underlyingError: error)))
}
}
I simply consider that any status code outside of the 200-299 range corresponds to an error.

Answer 2

ResponseSerializers have a single requirement. Largely you can just copy the existing serializers. For example, if you wanted to parse a CSV (with no response checking):
struct CommaDelimitedSerializer: ResponseSerializer {
func serialize(request: URLRequest?, response: HTTPURLResponse?, data: Data?, error: Error?) throws -> [String] {
// Call the existing StringResponseSerializer to get many behaviors automatically.
let string = try StringResponseSerializer().serialize(request: request,
response: response,
data: data,
error: error)
return Array(string.split(separator: ","))
}
}
You can read more in Alamofire's documentation.