Structuring a basic app iOS app - single view - best practice - ios

Question

I am currently working on a single view app that does the following:
Grabs users location using CoreLocation
Sends their lon/lat to an API
Returns tide data as JSON
Dive in to objects and keys within the JSON to return: tide levels, locations, etc and display them via text labels.
I have the majority of this working, but it is more so crammed in to viewDidLoad - I am trying to see the best way to organize something like this up. Would I break it in to different methods such as:
setTideData
displayTideData
Or would it be more broken down than that? (And yes im sure it all depends on the details too). I would be displaying probably 8-10 different stats on the view.
Things like
On viewDidLoad do I grab the users location or do it prior on viewDidAppear, etc
Would I then call my displayTideData method inside of viewDidLoad
Just looking for some type of general best practice, was trying to scan for some items but nothing was what I was looking for.
EDIT: Here is an example of my returned data -- https://gist.github.com/ryancoughlin/8043604
Any ideas?
Thanks

Answer 1

This is pretty much a matter of preference and style, but you could simplify your logic in a number of ways by separating certain parts into their own classes, eg:
You could use something like JSON model to deserialize the data into a class, and access it in a more convenient way
Loading the data and deserializing could be handled in a different class that would only return the object with the data you need
Etc.
It's hard to give a better advice without reviewing your code directly, but this should give you some pointers how to simplify things.
EDIT: A bit of code example how to separate the the deserialization and data handling into a custom object:
- (id)initWithJSON:(NSDictionary *)JSON
{
self = [super init];
if (self) {
self.gender = [JSON objectForKey:#"gender"];
self.email = [JSON objectForKey:#"email"];
self.firstName = [JSON objectForKey:#"first_name"];
self.lastName = [JSON objectForKey:#"last_name"];
self.personId = [[JSON objectForKey:#"person_id"] integerValue];
}
return self;
}
You would then simply create an object with the data like this:
Person *person = [[Person alloc] initWithJSON:JSON];
and simply access whatever data you need in a cleaner way:
self.myLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"Name: %#", person.firstName];

Answer 2

It sounds like you have a Massive View Controller, which is a bad thing. Try to reorganise your code so you have a fat model and a skinny controller. Controllers should only be responsible for creating and refreshing the view, bootstrapping the model and updating the model based on user interaction. Some possible model objects:
Fetching data from the server.
Parser for converting JSON objects into typed objects (thus encapsulating the knowledge of the JSON structure).
A simple interface (e.g. one object) for your view controller to pull data from and push data to.
Your model should contain all the business logic for the app.