How to implement protocols and delegates in SwiftUI - ios

I was converting one of my swift project into SwiftUI. I need to convert delegtes and protocols to SwiftUI, is it allowed in SwiftUI? or any alternative methods are there? Please help me i'm so confused in SwiftUI.
I'm calling a delegate method from one of my class, then delegate method will be present in another ViewController.
//PresenterClass
protocol SplashPresenterDelegate {
func didFetchedSystemInfo(info: String)
}
class SplashPresenter: NSObject {
var delegate: SplashPresenterDelegate?
func getSystemInfo(){
self.delegate?.didFetchedSystemInfo(info: "ResponseString")
}
}
// Viewcontroller class
class myViewController: UIViewController {
.
.
.
}
extension myViewController: SplashPresenterDelegate{
func didFetchedSystemInfo(info: String){
print("delegate called")
}
}
Please help me to convert this code to SwiftUI

Typically, SwiftUI prefers the pattern of taking callbacks rather than protocol/delegates. For instance, each button in an ActionSheet has a closure that is executed when the button is tapped.
You shouldn't just convert your code over directly, though. SwiftUI, being declarative, uses different paradigms for a lot of things. For instance, you wouldn't have a didFetchInfo method, you would just assign it to a #Published variable.
Think about having "single sources of truth", where a single variable is always correct. For example, List simply takes an array and updates when the array changes, unlike UITableView where you provide the data through numberOfRows and cellForRowAt. I don't know enough about your specific project to give more detail, but those are things to think about.

Related

How to handle not used functions from delegates in view controllers

I have a very general view that is created and used by multiple view controllers with 2 buttons, one of them sometimes is hidden depending on the needs.
This view delegates the tap of the two buttons.
protocol TheViewsDelegate: class {
func button1Tapped()
func button2Tapped()
}
Let's put that ViewControllerA creates this view and needs both buttons, this view controller will have to implement both delegate functions and do something inside it.
Now let's say that ViewControllerB creates the same view but just needs one of the buttons. This view controller will have to still implement button2Tapped() even though it will never be called and used.
Is there a way to handle this nicely? I imagine there's a nice solution where I don't need to implement this button2Tapped() if I don't need it.
I thought about making it optional by giving a default implementation but I don't like this solution, I like (and I think it's a good practice) the compiler giving me an error when a method it's not implement. Someone can jump into the project and not realising that he/she hasn't implement button2Tapped when needs to be implemented.
Note: This is a very simple example just to illustrate my question, but the question is more broad as in what to do when a function in a delegate is defined by controller that don't need to implement it.
I believe you want to use:
optional func
There are a couple of ways of declaring a protocol method as optional, one is using optional func which requires using #objc syntax, which a lot of programmers apparently don't like, and the other requires declaring an empty body in the extension of a protocol (which makes it optional by default).
protocol TheViewsDelegate: AnyObject {
func button1Tapped()
}
extension TheViewsDelegate {
func button2Tapped() {}
}
class SomeViewController: UIViewController, TheViewsDelegate {
func button1Tapped() {
// implement
}
}
By giving the protocol an empty body inside an extension of the protocol, that method is optional and does not need to be implemented by conforming objects.
For comparison, the alternative:
#objc protocol TheViewsDelegate: AnyObject {
func button1Tapped()
#objc optional func button2Tapped()
}
class SomeViewController: UIViewController, TheViewsDelegate {
func button1Tapped() {
// implement
}
}

Is there a way to have a custom class act on a UIView without having the ViewController passed (as reference) upon its initialization?

Example: I have a SpeechSynthesizer class that needs to update something in my UIView when it’s done uttering a piece of text. Since the SpeechSynthesizer class conforms to protocol AVSpeechSynthesizerDelegate, it is the one that receives the didFinish signal when the uttering has been completed. The idea here is to keep the ViewController from having too many delegate methods and a long list of protocols to conform to. The workaround I found was to have the ViewController passed in as a SpeechSynthesizer initialization parameter. This way I get to access the ViewController connected to the UIView I want to update from inside the SpeechSynthesizer class. The thing I don’t like about it is that it looks kind of ugly to have the ViewController passed in as a parameter to every single class that needs to use it. So I wonder, which other way I could accomplish this.
I suppose another way to ask the question is: How can I make the function
private func speechSynthesizer(_ synthesizer: AVSpeechSynthesizer, didFinish utterance: AVSpeechUtterance)
return something to a ViewController since it's not "called" by it?
I added a reply on Quora. Copying it here:
After doing some research and testing on code of my own here are 2 solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: The Delegate Pattern:
Create a custom delegate protocol in the ViewController
protocol ViewControllerDelegate:class {
func getViewLayer() -> CALayer
}
The ViewController must conform to this newly created protocol and therefore implement all the functions defined by it, so somewhere in the class ViewController you add:
public func getViewLayer() -> CALayer {
return self.view.layer
}
Then on my custom class, ReadTextMachine, I added a variable of the ViewControllerDelegate type
private weak var viewControllerDelegate: ViewControllerDelegate?
The variable must be weak and protocol must be of type class in order to solve a “retain cycle” problem (since both the custom class and the ViewController will point to each other)
You’ll notice now that the function call inside the ViewController is already “callable” from the custom class, so in my ReadTextMachine I added:
let viewLayer = self.viewControllerDelegate?.getViewLayer()
self.cameraPreview = CameraPreview(session: self.camera.getSession(), container: viewLayer!)
self.cameraPreview?.addPreview()
In the above case, my CameraPreview (yes, a 3rd class in this example) simply adds a camera preview layer on the UIView. For that it needed access to the main View’s layer.
The above code still doesn’t work because our original viewController’s instance hasn’t been passed as reference anywhere in our code. For that we add the following function in ReadTextMachine:
public func setViewControllerDelegate(viewController: ViewController) { // call this from the ViewController so that ViewController can be accessed from here.
self.viewControllerDelegate = viewController
}
The above piece of code will have to be called from the ViewController, after we instantiate our custom class (ReadTextMachine), so that the viewControllerDelegate inside it points to the ViewController. So in our ViewController.swift:
operatingMode = ReadTextMachine()
operatingMode.setViewControllerDelegate(viewController: self)
Another example and explanation can be found in this video from LetsBuildThatApp. I derived my solution mostly from it.
My current app in development applying the above solution can be found here: agu3rra/World-Aloud
Solution 2: Notifications and Observers pattern
This one is a bit easier to understand and follow. The general idea is to have your custom class broadcast a message which triggers a function call on your ViewController since it has an observer setup, waiting to hear that message.
So to give an example, in the context I used it, I have a CameraCapture class which uses AVFoundation to capture a photo. The capture photo trigger cannot immediately return an image, since iOS has a set of steps to execute before actually generating an image. I wanted my ReadTextMachine to resume an activity after CameraCapture had a photo available. (To apply this in the context of the CustomClass triggers ViewController event is basically the same, since both are actual classes in an iOS app as well).
So the 1st thing I did was create a broadcast function since I would use it in many places in my app. I simply placed it in a Utilities.swift file in the Xcode project.
public func broadcastNotification(name: String) {
let notification = Notification.Name(rawValue: name)
NotificationCenter.default.post(name: notification, object: nil)
}
The above function takes a string, which must be a unique notification identifier, and broadcasts it thru NotificationCenter.
In my CameraCapture class, I added a static constant to reference the unique identifier of the message:
static let NOTIFY_PHOTO_CAPTURED = "agu3rra.worldAloud.photo.captured"
For those who know AVFoundation, a photo is available when event didFinishProcessingPhoto gets executed, so at the end of that I added:
broadcastNotification(name: CameraCapture.NOTIFY_PHOTO_CAPTURED)
The above is a call to my previously defined utility function.
For my ReadTextMachine class to be able to catch that notification, I added the following on its init() and deinit routines:
override init() {
super.init()
// Setup event observers
let notification1 = Notification.Name(rawValue: CameraCapture.NOTIFY_PHOTO_CAPTURED)
NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self,
selector: #selector(self.processingDoneTakingPhoto),
name: notification1,
object: nil)
}
deinit {
NotificationCenter.default.removeObserver(self) // cleanup observer once instance no longer exists
}
Removing the observer is important at deinit so that when your object is deallocated from memory, the observer isn’t left lingering around. The above configured observer triggers a function call inside ReadTextMachine:
#IBAction private func processingDoneTakingPhoto() {
// does my stuff
}
That’s it! Again, the entire Xcode project can be downloaded from my project’s Git repository: agu3rra/World-Aloud
Hope this can be of use to others.
Cheers!

How to call the same function on multiple classes?

I have an UIViewController with 4 UIButtons. A user can tap any of those UIButtons and an UIView pops up. I want to add an didAppear() and didDisappear() function on the classes which are holding the UIViews depending on the users action. How can I call didDisappear() without the use of an enum, for example:
func didDisappear(view: EnumViews){
switch view{
case view0: myClassWithView0.didDisappear()
case view1: myClassWithView1.didDisappear()
case view2: myClassWithView2.didDisappear()
case view3: myClassWithView3.didDisappear()
}
}
Now I get 4 times duplicate data. I know that function exists for my class with a UIView, but how to call it? I made a protocol:
protocol ViewProtocol{
func didAppear()
func didDisappear()
}
I made the classes which are holding the UIView's conform to that protocol. However I do not know how to use it, when I create the class I get the error:
'myClassWithUIView' cannot be constructed because it has no accessible
initializers
The classes are all in an array and I can identify which UIView needs to pop up from the sender.tag. Ideally, I want to have something like this:
#IBAction func bringNewUIView(_ sender: UIButton) {
let newView = myArrayOfClassesWithUIView[sender.tag]
newView.didAppear()
}
You've got many things going on here. I'll start with the easy one.
'myClassWithUIView' cannot be constructed because it has no accessible initializers
This just means you don't have an initializer for your class. So inside your myClassWithUIView implementation you need to have init. I can't really help you with building the init because I don't know how that class is structured, but I will assume this is something you know how to do anyway.
Your #IBAction seems fine. Once you have an array of your classes that seems like it should work. Edit your post if that is not the case.
Finally, for your didDisappear question, you can do something like this:
func didDisappear(view: EnumViews) {
//Check to see if this view conforms to your ViewProtocol (that's not a good name, btw)
if let myClass = view as? ViewProtocol {
//Since it does conform to ViewProtocol you can call didDisappear on it
myClass.didDisappear()
}
}
Alternatively, if you already know that the didDisappear function is always passing in a view that conforms to ViewProtocol why not just change the argument and make that easier?
func didDisappear(view: ViewProtocol) {
view.didDisappear()
}

Protocol Oriented Programming, implicitly calling extension method

Having my first crack at POP. In this case I want to decorate some UIViewControllers so that any that they automatically raise a 'Page viewed' analytics event.
So I created a protocol, and and extension for that protocol:
protocol ReportPageViewedEvent {
func reportPageViewed()
var pageName : String? { get set }
}
extension ReportPageViewedEvent where Self: UIViewController
{
func reportPageViewed()
{
guard let pageName = self.pageName else
{
fatalError("UIViewController implements ReportPageViewEvent protocol but did not set pageName property")
}
let eventBusiness = EventBusiness.sharedInstance
eventBusiness.logUserViewedPage(pageName)
}
}
This works as I want, if I decorate a UIViewController with ReportPageViewedEvent like this:
class HomeView: UIViewController, ReportPageViewedEvent {
I get a compiler error unless I set 'pageName' which is exactly what I want.
Where I am getting unstuck is where and how to call the actual reportPageViewed() method. I really want it to be called from viewDidLoad which means I either have to modify every 'viewDidLoad' in every controller that uses it, or subclass and call the method in the super class which defies the point of using POP in the first place.
Is there a nice way to achieve this. I can't find an example like this in any tutorial/blog.
Basically, there is always some behaviour shared by all the screens of your app. So it is appropriate to create a class called (for example) BaseViewController so all the other view controllers will inherit from it.
In BaseViewController's viewDidLoad you can call the reportPageViewed() method.
However, this approach makes the Protocol Oriented Programming not needed. Protocols are useful when you need to assign some same behaviour to objects that have nothing in common (which is not the case for app screens).

Assigning Functions from other Classes in Swift

Is it possible to access and run a specific method/function from another class that can change dynamically as the app is run?
I’ll try to simplify the problem as much as possible.
SelectionPage.swift
Choose which class needs to be selected and accessed using an UIPickerView - 10 possible selections (Class1, Class2, Class3,…, Class10).
Class1.swift, Class2.swift, … Class10.swift
Each of the 10 classes has a single method that has exactly the same name but is programmed differently:
func runOnUpdate() { }
GameSceneViewController.swift
When a selection is made on the SelectionPage, the app segues to a GameSceneViewController where the specific selected function is run every time the update function is run:
override func update(currentTime: CFTimeInterval)
{
// run runOnUpdate() function here from selected class
}
Inside the update function, I would like to execute the runOnUpdate( ) function depending on which class was selected on the SelectionPage. Is this possible? Ideally I'd like to be able to assign the specific class/method in the:
override func didMoveToView(view: SKView)
so that I can access in other functions as well.
I’ve looked into lazy instantiation, creating delegates for each of the classes, #objc(Class1), arrays of [AnyClass], typealias, global variables in structs, singletons etc. but I’m unable to figure out how to make this work.
It seems like a fairly common problem so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!
You were correct in trying delegates as this is a case where you should make a protocol and a delegate. The protocol requires the function. From there you set the delegate property to an instance of a class that conforms to that protocol and then you call delegate?.someFunction() to call the function on the given object.
class ViewController: UIViewController {
var delegate: Updatable?
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
let foo = Foo()
delegate = foo
delegate?.runOnUpdate() // prints do something
}
}
protocol Updatable {
func runOnUpdate()
}
class Foo: NSObject, Updatable {
func runOnUpdate() {
println("do something")
}
}

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