I’ve recently been diving into iOS programming and decided to make a simple directory app of people I work with. The app parses a locally stored JSON file that has the name and role of a person. I’m also hosting some profile photos of the people in a Dropbox folder.
Instead of adding another key/value pair to my JSON file for every person, I wanted to just use their name to grab their corresponding profile photo from Dropbox.
Each photo is stored on Dropbox with a filename syntax of firstname-lastname.jpg. The syntax of each name in the JSON file is FirstName LastName.
I don’t think Objective-C has computed values like Ember.js does. So I created a simple dasherize method that returns a string in the format that I need for the Dropbox photos.
First, the method creates a lowercase copy of the string you pass to the method. Then each occurrence of a space is replaced with a -. Finally a dasherized string is returned, which I can stick in a formatted string to pull the photo from Dropbox.
The method isn’t as robust as Ember.js’ dasherize method, so I can definitely improve upon it to handle the same inputs Ember.js’ method does.