So, if you are considering implementing something using NSURLConnection: take a moment to make sure you will never talk to a server expecting you to authenticate via NTLM (which is IIS as near as I can tell) before you waste two evenings doing it.

That being said, NSURLConnection is really cool and I wish I could use it.

For my next trick, figure out how to do this with CFHTTPMessage, which does provide kCFHTTPAuthenticationSchemeNTLM for authentication.

*sigh*

Well, it looks like the answer has appeared in my feed reader on an entry from Matt Gallagher’s Cocoa With Love blog:Key Value Information.

I’ll just quote him (from the very end of his post):

Similarly, if you were interested in key value coding that may access instance variables directly, you could use class _getClassVariable to get any instance variables with the same name as the key.

The leading underscore on the method name indicates that it’s undocumented and internal to Apple’s implementation. So using it isn’t necessarily the smartest thing in the world. But sometimes, you’ve gotta do what you gotta do.

Now that I have a method name, I’ll probably resume my search for information on this technique and will obviously report any findings here.

Update: July 29, 2008

I did some poking around in the Objective-C 2.0 Runtime Reference and found the class_copyIvarList function which returns an array of Ivar types. Ivar is a struct containing fields for the ivar_name, ivar_type, and offset. Combined with object_getIvar, I think I would have been much closer to achieving my original goal.

I don’t know why I couldn’t find this before. I guess I was just looking in the wrong places.

I’ve written a few things over there in the past which are sort of the “final product” of the stuff here. This is my developer’s notebook and Ternary Operator is the finished product of the results of my explorations and mistakes. If that makes any sense. I’ll probably also do a little cross posting because I’m annoying like that.

Anyway. Link-wise, here’s some of the stuff I’ve already written:

• Making SOAP Calls From OS X, The Easy Way — An exploration of using OS X’s WSMethodInvocation API to talk to SOAP servers sitting on the web.
• Sending Up Custom Types As Parameters In A SOAP Request On OS X — An exploration of the hoops one must jump through to use complex types in a SOAP request from OS X.
• Processing Command Arguments In Foundation, The Easy Way — A quick note I wrote when I discovered that one can use NSUserDefaults to process command line arguments in OS X. Since I didn’t know this before, I decided to document it.

And…er…That’s it. Like I said, there’s a distinct lack of profoundness. That shouldn’t be a big problem here, though, because I’m not interested in the profound. I’m interested in jotting things down as I learn them, detailing frustrations when the technology doesn’t work (or when the documentation makes me think the technology should work in a way that doesn’t mimic reality (or the documentation is just absent)). Basically, I expect this blog to just be more fun.