Intermediate

 
14
Dec
2015
 

Swift Type Constrained Extensions: Express Yourself

by Matt Long

I admit it. I was pretty down when Swift was announced. I appreciated the finer points of the reasons for it, however, they weren’t convincing–at least not to me–not at first. I denied that it was actually “expressive” as the overall community was referring to it, however, that was before version 2. It’s at the point when the lights went on for me. I am now a convert and this post explains why–at least one of the reasons. The only question I ask now is while you can do some really cool expressive things, should you? You’ll see what I mean if you read on.
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29
Oct
2014
 

Protocols in Swift With Core Data

by Matt Long

Sometimes you have a set of objects you want to display in the same form–say, for example, in a table view controller. What if those objects have, by design, nothing in common and nothing to do with each other? This is a case where you can create and conform to a protocol–known in some languages as an interface–to provide a simple way to have each class type provide a display name that can be displayed in your table view controller.

Recently while using this language feature writing Swift code, I ran into a few snags and learned from the process. I figured I would document it in this screencast. It walks you all the way through from project creation, so it’s about 35 minutes.

Here’s what you will learn:

  • How to setup CoreData entities in the data model
  • How to add a run script action to build your managed object classes using mogenerator
  • How to create a protocol in Xcode 6
  • How to implement a protocol in the various managed object classes
  • How to preload your CoreData store with test objects in code
  • How to load each object type generically into a table view controller

And if you want to just cut to the chase, grab the code from github.

Protocols in Swift With Core Data from Skye Road Systems on Vimeo.

 
5
Feb
2013
 

Querying Objective-C Data Collections

by Matt Long

In my Xcode LLDB Tutorial, I mention using the debugger to interrogate data collections. Well, I wanted to elaborate on that idea a little because there are some techniques you can use for querying objective-c data collections that are very powerful.

If you develop apps for clients, you my be one of the lucky ones–the ones who actually get to model your data and use Core Data to store and access it. But I’m betting there are many of you who aren’t the lucky ones–or at least not on all of your projects. From time to time you have to deal with data in whatever format your client gives it to you. Maybe you’ve even suggested taking the CSVs or Plists (or whatever other formats clients have come up with to ruin your life) and actually loading those into Core Data. But they don’t get Core Data and they shoot down the idea. Well, you may want to just walk away from the gig. However, if you’re like me, you’ve got bills to pay and clients (the good ones at least) tend to help you accomplish that. Well, fortunately for us, Objective-C makes dealing with this kind of data manageable using a little technique known as KVC, Key-Value-Coding, with array filtering and sorting.

This is not an advanced topic, so if you’re already familiar with how KVC and array filtering and sorting works, this post may not help you as much. But for those of you who are fairly new to iOS development, you need to know about this magical feature of the language as all the senior iOS developers use it and you should too. (more…)