Saving UIColor to and loading from NSUserDefaults

Question

What's the easiest way to save a UIColor into NSUserDefaults and then get it back out?

Answer 1

With the accepted answer, you'll quickly end up with a lot of NSKeyed archives & unarchives all over your code. A cleaner solution is to extend UserDefaults. This is exactly what extensions are for; UserDefaults probably doesn't know about UIColor as it is because UIKit and Foundation are different frameworks.

Swift

extension UserDefaults {

    func color(forKey key: String) -> UIColor? {
        var color: UIColor?
        if let colorData = data(forKey: key) {
            color = NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObject(with: colorData) as? UIColor
        }
        return color
    }

    func set(_ value: UIColor?, forKey key: String) {
        var colorData: Data?
        if let color = value {
            colorData = NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData(withRootObject: color)
        }
        set(colorData, forKey: key)
    }

}

Swift 4.2

extension UserDefaults {

    func color(forKey key: String) -> UIColor? {

        guard let colorData = data(forKey: key) else { return nil }

        do {
            return try NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchivedObject(ofClass: UIColor.self, from: colorData)
        } catch let error {
            print("color error \(error.localizedDescription)")
            return nil
        }

    }

    func set(_ value: UIColor?, forKey key: String) {

        guard let color = value else { return }
        do {
            let data = try NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData(withRootObject: color, requiringSecureCoding: false)
            set(data, forKey: key)
        } catch let error {
            print("error color key data not saved \(error.localizedDescription)")
        }

    }

}

Usage

UserDefaults.standard.set(UIColor.white, forKey: "white")
let whiteColor = UserDefaults.standard.color(forKey: "white")

This can also be done in Objective-C with a category.

I've added the Swift file as a gist here.