Maz Development Directory - The Daily WTF III

In today’s wtf, we will looking at a very peculiar case.

The Fail

While going over the code, I noticed a very strange block. The programmer was constructing a JSON payload from available variables and then passing the payload to the visible view controller, like so:

NSString *vanityURL = params[@"vanity_url"];
NSDictionary *payloadParams = @{@"endpoint" : @"story/profile",
                                @"params" : @{@"vanity_url": vanityURL},
                                @"type" : @"story"};

NSData *jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:payloadParams
                                                   options:0
                                                     error:nil];

NSString *payload = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

params = @{@"feedbackPayload" : payload,
           @"user_vanity_url" : vanityURL,
           @"analytics_key": vanityURL,
           @"title": vanityURL};

I really don’t want to get into the details of where these hardcoded strings came from, or why the hell a JSON payload is created in the first place, but there is no limit to how bad code can be, apparently.

NOTE: I added newline separations for the reader to be able to read the code. It was actually all smushed together without any spacing.

… One more fun fact, this code lies in the infamously abused AppDelegate class.