When Apple announced their own Functional Reactive Programming framework at WWDC 2019 I was super excited. Finally, a simplified, easy to use framework that we could use to dip our toes in FRP. What made it even better is that SwiftUI makes heavy use of Combine, which means that Apple had to buy in to the technology themselves. This made it seem unlikely that Apple would abandon the technology any time soon. Then WWDC 2020 came around and there weren’t any meaningful changes to Combine. It was hardly even mentioned in the sessions. To me, this was a signal that...

This post was originally published in 2021 and has been touched up for 2024 WWDC is always an exciting time for iOS engineers. It's the one week a year where we're all newcomers to a whole range of features and APIs that Apple has just unleashed upon the world through their latest Xcode, macOS, iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and watchOS betas. The entire community comes out of hiding and we all come together to share thoughts, experiences, opinions, and findings. For a whole week, Apple releases dozens of sessions on different topics, and we all scramble to watch them as...

A common pattern on iOS, and in Swift, is to define an instance of an object that you can access from any place in your app. Common examples are URLSession.shared, FileManager.default, and UserDefaults.standard. These objects can all be considered shared instances, or globally available instances. Defining a shared instance is commonly done as follows: struct DataProvider { static let shared = DataProvider() // useful properties and methods } It's common for developers to call this a singleton, or a singleton instance. The singleton pattern is a pattern that allows developers to specify an object that can only ever have one...

When you're working with Arrays in Swift, it's likely that you'll want to sort them at some point. In Swift, there are two ways to sort an Array: Through the Comparable implementation for each element in your array By providing a closure to perform a manual/specialized comparison between elements If you have a homogenous array of elements, for example [String], you can rely on String's implementation of Comparable to sort an array of String in some sensible manner. There are two ways to sort an array of Comparable elements: var strings = ["Oh", "Hello", "World", "This", "Is", "An", "Unsorted", "Array"]...

Decoding data, like JSON, is often relatively straightforward. For a lot of use cases, you won't need to know or understand a lot more than what I explain in this post. However, sometimes you need to dive deeper into Codable, and you end up writing custom encoding or decoding logic like I explain in this post. In more advanced scenarios, you might need to have an extremely flexible approach to decoding data. For example, you might want to decode your data into an enum that has an associated value depending on one or more properties that exist in your JSON...

The default behavior for Codable is often good enough, especially when you combine this with custom CodingKeys, it's possible to encode and decode a wide variety of JSON data without any extra work. Unfortunately, there are a lot of situations where you'll need to have even more control. The reasons for needing this control are varied. You might want to flatten a deeply nested JSON structure into a single Codable object. Or maybe you want to assign a default value to a property if it's not possible to extract this value from the received JSON data. Or maybe you want...

In the introductory post for this series you learned the basics of decoding and encoding JSON to and from your Swift structs. In that post, you learned that your JSON object is essentially a dictionary, and that the JSON's dictionary key's are mapped to your Swift object's properties. When encoding, your Swift properties are used as keys in the encoded JSON output dictionary. Unfortunately, we don't always have the luxury of a 1 to 1 mapping between JSON and our Swift objects. For example, the JSON you're working with might use snake case (snake_case) instead of camel case (camelCase) for...

Virtually every modern application needs some way to retrieve, and use, data from a remote source. This data is commonly fetched by making a network request to a webserver that returns data in a JSON format. When you're working with Javascript, this JSON data can be easily decoded into a Javascript object. Javascript doesn't have strong typing, so a JSON object in Javascript is really just a JavaScript Object. Objects in Javascript are very comparable to dictionaries in Swift, except they aren't strongly typed and they have a couple of extra features. But that's way beyond what I want to...

Often, you'll want you Swift models to resemble JSON that's produced by an external source, like a server, as closely as possible. However, there are times when the JSON you receive is nested several levels deep and you might not consider this appropriate or needed for your application. Or maybe you're only interested in a couple of fields from the JSON response and these fields are hidden several levels deep in the JSON that's returned by a server. In this post I'll show you how you can use nested containers to decode nested JSON data into a flat struct with...

This article covers a topic that is extensively covered in my Practical Core Data book. This book is intended to help you learn Core Data from scratch using modern techniques and every chapter features sample apps in SwiftUI as well as UIKit whenever this is relevant. When you use Core Data in a UIKit or SwiftUI app, the easiest way to do this is through a fetched results controller. In SwiftUI, fetched results controller is best used through the @FetchRequest property wrapper. In UIKit, a fetched results controller can be conveniently set up to provide diffable data source snapshots for...