NSObject+AutoDescription is an category that greatly simplifies the process of writing description method for data models.

- (NSString *)description method provide information about receiver instance. By default this method prints the object name and its address in memory. It looks like <NAUser: 0x6b67f70> and... pretty useless. If you have a lot of classes-models in project, overloading description method for each class is very difficult and dreary. This category is based on reflection. By getting properties names and values it provides information about receiver in standard manner.

NSArray, NSDictionary and NSSet by default provides human-readable description. But there is one small problem: it contains newline symbols and white spaces. If we use default description for NSArray, NSDictionary or NSSet in user defined class description we get \n, \t, \", and \\ symbols. It looks ugly. For a clear description of these "erroneous" classes there is CleanDescription category. These categories emulate standard descriptions, but without special characters.

#import "NAUser.h"
#import "NSObject+AutoDescription.h"

@implementation NAUser

- (NSString *)description
{
    return [self autoDescription];
}

@end

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7521683/nsdictionary-description-formatting-problem-treats-structure-like-char-data
• http://atkit.com/dev/objective-c/auto-description-category-nsobject-object/
• http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/overriding-nsobject-description-method.html

Alexey Aleshkov

• https://github.com/djmadcat
• https://twitter.com/coreshock
• djmadcat@gmail.com

NSObject-AutoDescription is available under the BSD 2-Clause license. See the LICENSE file for more info.