AFNetworking POSTing malformed JSON - single quotes and [Object] refs - objective-c

Question

I am using AFNetworking and I am trying to POST a JSON structure. The problem is that instead of something like {"my_property":"my value"}, it's formatting it as {my_property:'my_value'}. I guess the loss of the first set of quotes is OK in most cases, but I'm not sure what to do with the non-JSON single quotes and am pretty confused as to why it would generate single quotes at all given that it knows it's creating JSON from an NSDictionary. Additionally, it's including [Object] refs where I would just expect a "{". This is what the server is getting:
...
num_matches: 32,
view_instance: properties_in_view: [Object],
[ { view_instance_ctr: 0, view_id: '4e5bb37258200ed9aa000011' },
...
The target is iOS 5.0, so I'm assuming it's using NSJSONSerialization to create JSON (although I haven't tried to verify this yet). The dictionary I send validates to JSON with isValidJSONObject. If I print out the serialized version, it looks great. The simplified version of the code looks like:
NSDictionary *params = myDictionaryThatValidatesToJSON;
httpClient.parameterEncoding = AFJSONParameterEncoding;
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [httpClient
requestWithMethod:#"POST" path:#"" parameters:params];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request];
[operation start];
I'm hoping there's a bigDummy = NO flag I'm missing.

Answer 1

I think your issue is on the server side - ie. the debug you've quoted in your question is not the raw JSON text received by the server, but some reinterpretation of this that some component on the server has done.

Answer 2

Michael is correct. By using his code of data i'm using this to perform POST request with JSOn parameter :
// dataDictionary is your parameter dictionary
NSError *error = nil;
NSData* jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:dataDictionary options:NSJSONWritingPrettyPrinted error:&error];
//NSString *jsonOut = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
AFHTTPClient *httpClient = [[AFHTTPClient alloc] initWithBaseURL:[NSURL URLWithString:webURL]];
[httpClient setParameterEncoding:AFFormURLParameterEncoding];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [httpClient requestWithMethod:#"POST"
path:#"Webservice URL"
parameters:nil];
NSMutableData *body = [NSMutableData data];
[body appendData:jsonData];
[request setHTTPBody:body];
[request setHTTPMethod:#"POST"];
[request setValue:#"application/json" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Accept"];
[request setValue:#"application/json" forHTTPHeaderField:#"content-type"];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request];
[httpClient registerHTTPOperationClass:[AFHTTPRequestOperation class]];
[operation setCompletionBlockWithSuccess:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, id responseObject) {
// Print the response body in text
NSLog(#"Response: %#", [[NSString alloc] initWithData:responseObject encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);
} failure:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, NSError *error) {
NSLog(#"Error: %#", error);
}];
[operation start];