So, now Swift 4 is here and things are changing. One of the big improvements of Swift 4 is the incorporation of serialisation for classes, structs and enums. In contrast to the previous versions which rely on the old NSObject/NSCoding mechanisms the new Codable protocol is not restricted to classes only. And even better, if you do not have special needs the compiler will synthesise the needed functions for you as we will see later.
struct
Making structs serializable
Just for completeness I’d like to show in this post how to make structs serializable in the same manner as enums (see this post). Again, we transform the struct to a dictionary of NSCoding compliant types and give it to an NSCoder (e.g. NSKeyedArchiver) for coding. The other way round we get the decoded dictionary and initialize the desired struct with it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it. Let’s start.