Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored by Proxyman, nor am I affiliated with Proxyman in any way. I pay for my license myself, and this post is simply written as a guide to learning more about a tool that I find very important in the iOS Developer toolbox. Networking is an essential part of modern iOS applications. Most apps I’ve worked have some kind of networking component. Sometimes the networking layer involves user authentication, token refresh flows, and more. Other times, I’ll simply need to hit one or two endpoints to fetch new data or configuration files for my app....

When you perform a URL Request in your app, you typically configure the request in your code and when it's all set up you pass it off to a URLSession data task, and the request should succeed if everything goes as expected. When the request is misconfigured, the server will hopefully return a useful error and you can fix your code accordingly. There are times, however, where the server does not give the information you need. Or your requests succeed but your results are not quite what you expect. It's times like these when I really wish that there was...

In the past two weeks I have introduced you to Combine and I've shown you in detail how Publishers and Subscribers work in Combine. This week I want to take a more practical route and explore Combine in a real-world setting. A while ago, I published a post that explained how you can architect and build a networking layer in Swift without any third-party dependencies. If you haven't seen that post before, and want to be able to properly follow along with this post, I recommend that you skim over it and examine the end result of that post. This...

One of the topics that I could write dozens of posts on is networking. Making calls to a remote API to retrieve or persist data is something that is a key feature in many apps that are currently in the App Store. Some apps make extensive use of the network while others only need the network to retrieve data periodically. No matter how extensively your app uses the network, the patterns for using the network in a clean and appropriate manner are often (roughly) the same. I have written several posts on networking in the past: Architecting a robust networking...

Both networking and protocols are topics that I could write dozens of posts on, and I would still have more ideas and examples left in my head. In today's article, I would like to combine the topics of networking and protocols and explain how you can design a robust networking layer for your app, that's 100% testable and mockable because everything down to the URLRequest is abstracted behind a protocol. Defining our goals Any time you're getting ready to write code, you should define your goals first. What are you writing? What problems are you trying to solve? This is...

When your app shows images from the network in a table view or collection view, you need to load the images asynchronously to make sure your list scrolls smoothly. More importantly, you’ll need to somehow connect the image that you’re loading to the correct cell in your list (instead of table view or collection view, I’m going to say list from now on). And if the cell goes out of view and is reused to display new data with a new image, you’ll want to cancel the in-progress image load to make sure new images are loaded immediately. And, to...

Apps send and receive data all the time. Some apps mostly read data from the network, others are more focussed on sending data to servers. Depending on your needs, you might need to be able to send data to a server as quickly as possible, or maybe you need to receive new data as soon as it’s available from a server. Every app has different needs and several mechanisms exist to streamline network communication. In this post week’s blog post, I will focus on one specific use of networking in apps. We’ll look at using web sockets to receive data...

One of those tasks that always throws me off balance is building a form that allows users to upload a form with a picture attached to it. I know that it involves configuring my request to be multipart, that I need to attach the picture as data and there’s something involved with setting a content disposition. This is usually about as far as I go until I decide it might be a good time to go to github.com and grab the Carthage URL for Alamofire. If you’re reading this and you’ve implemented POST requests that allow users to upload photos...

Modern applications often rely on data from a network connection to work as intended. Sometimes they rely heavily on the network and are almost worthless without an internet connection while other apps can function mostly fine without a network connection. What these apps have in common is that they contain code that might be challenging to write tests for. Whenever you write unit tests, you should always strive to make your tests as predictable, reproducible and most importantly independent of external factors as possible. This is a huge difference compared to integration testing where you’d test a certain part of...