design patterns - Objective-C switch using objects?

Question

I'm doing some Objective-C programming that involves parsing an NSXmlDocument and populating an objects properties from the result.

First version looked like this:

if([elementName compare:@"companyName"] == 0) 
  [character setCorporationName:currentElementText]; 
else if([elementName compare:@"corporationID"] == 0) 
  [character setCorporationID:currentElementText]; 
else if([elementName compare:@"name"] == 0) 
  ...

But I don't like the if-else-if-else pattern this produces. Looking at the switch statement I see that i can only handle ints, chars etc and not objects... so is there a better implementation pattern I'm not aware of?

BTW I did actually come up with a better solution for setting the object's properties, but I want to know specifically about the if-else vs switch pattern in Objective-C

Answer 1

You should take advantage of Key-Value Coding:

[character setValue:currentElementText forKey:elementName];

If the data is untrusted, you might want to check that the key is valid:

if (![validKeysCollection containsObject:elementName])
    // Exception or error