How do I create a failable init? How do you initialize stored properties and return nil?

Hi Lana -

Im going to start off with explaining what a bailable initializer does, and what you did wrong.

A failable initializer is basically an initializer for the properties of the object, just it can return nil. In the video, Pasan showed how an error arose if you tried returning nil without the initializer fallible.

The exercise is asking you to return a dictionary, which by default returns an Optional value. This means that you need to use a failable initializer when you take a dictionary as an initializer argument. The first line of your code is correct. You need to take a single argument: dict, as a type dictionary with [String: String]. And you were right as it is declared with init?.

But what you did wrong is in the init body. Remember how you have to use the self keyword to store the init values in the object property values? Well you are trying to use those property values inside the initializer, therefore it is out of scope.

Here's the solution I came up with:

init?(dict: [String: String]) {
    guard let title = dict["title"], let author = dict["author"] else {
        return nil
    }
    self.title = title
    self.author = author
    self.price = dict["price"]
    self.pubDate = dict["pubDate"]
}

}

The reason this works, is that it uses the guard statement to check the two non-Optional stored properties, and if they don't exist, it returns nil for the instance of the Friend struct.

Basically, look at the code already provided. It declares 4 properties: title, author, price, and pubDate. price and pubDate are Optional Strings, as show in the type declaration. The others are just Strings. This means that you need to make sure that the non-Optional properties are checked to see if their values exist, and if they don't, nil needs to be returned. I used guard here for the early exit of returning nil.

Then there is now title and author constants that we have checked and can now use, so we use self to set those values to the stored properties.

Then, since price and pubDate are Optionals, the check is not required, and therefore we can try and get the keys directly, setting them to their stored properties inside the body of the struct.

I hope this helped, and if you have any more questions about this, just ask!

~Jack