I am working on a tv tracking app where you can search for tv shows and save them to see when a new episode comes out.
My question is, how would I get the movie data from the cell in the searchTableViewController and present the selected data into the cell on myShowsTableViewController?
This is a very broad question and is generally not suitable for StackOverflow, which is for more "granular questions".
That said, I would recommend creating a class called DataManager or something like that. In terms of making your API calls, I would recommend using something like Alamofire for making API calls. Lastly, I would recommend reading up on the Codable protocol for decoding the JSON the API sends back. When you decode your JSON, you'll want to store the structs somewhere where your view controller can see it.
To use CocoaPods, here's a good primer (You'd use them for Alamofire).
Your data manager would look something like this (I'll use NSObject for simplicity's sake, but you could just create your own class):
struct Shows: Codable {
// Whatever the API sends back, you've got to map it here
}
class DataManager: NSObject {
var shows: [Shows] = [] // empty array of shows to start
func methodToGetAPIResponse() {
// Alamofire call & JSON decoding here
// Once you get a valid response, shows = try JSONDecoder().decode...
}
}
You could so something like this for your DataManager in your view controller class:
let dataManager = DataManager()
Then, in your UITableViewDataSource methods, numberOfRowsAtIndexPath would be return dataManager.shows.count and cellForRowAtIndexPath you'd get a hold of the object to populate your labels like so:
let show = dataManager.shows[indexPath.row]
Anyway, that ought to be enough to get you started. Good luck! Try to be more granular with your questions in the future.
Related
In my swift code below I am trying to fetch all of my names in core data to print. I am getting a compile error on context saying it can't be found in scope. I have attached a photo as well so you can see what is in my core data.
#objc func pressRight(){
var locations = [Place]() // Where Locations = your NSManaged Class
var fetchRequest = NSFetchRequest<NSFetchRequestResult>(entityName: "name")
locations = context.executeFetchRequest(fetchRequest, error: nil) as [Place]
// Then you can use your properties.
for location in locations {
print(location.name)
}
}
This isn't a Core Data problem, it's a Swift problem. All variables and properties in Swift have to be declared before you can use them. For example you can't just write
i = 5
Unless somewhere you already have something like
var i: Int
In your code you're using something called context that was never declared. Swift doesn't know what it is, which is what it's telling you.
Since you're using Core Data it looks like you want context to be an instance of NSManagedObjectContext. If your app already has an NSPersistentContainer somewhere, you can get a context from it, using either viewContext or newBackgroundContext (which one depends on exactly how you're using it; here it's probably viewContext).
If you don't already have an NSPersistentContainer somewhere in your app, you may want to read up a little on how to use Core Data. You can't just declare the context; it needs to be configured correctly with the container before use.
I'm new to and starting to look at swift.
is it possible to store and retrieve data in swift without having to use NSObject?
here I what I'm trying to achieve. I have a set of 4 ViewControllers.
On the first ViewController I want to record a name.
In my last ViewController I want to read that name.
I tried to store it in a simple model as shown:
class infoModel
{
var m_name : String
init(_name: String) {
self.m_name = _name
}
func getName() -> String {
return m_name
}
}
when I call getName from my fourth View its null?
I know its possible to pass data in segue or use NSUserDefaults, but I'm curious if its possible for the model object to retain the value?
Thank you in advance for your time
I think this is general programming rule for objected oriented languages.
As long as you have reference to the same object, you will have the object with the same data. And its up to you how you pass this data between other objects; using delegates or just assigning some variable, etc.
Also there are ways how to save data which allows you to save data somewhere else and then retrieve them. To saving small amount of data you can use in Swift UserDefaults, but for bigger amount of data you should work with some database (e.g. Realm, CoreData).
trying a few things out in Swift. I’m trying to get some things that seem muddled to me straightened out - mostly to do with how I deal with variables and referencing them in a project.
What I am trying to do is keep a variable (based on a struct) defined in ViewController accessed and updated from various other functions within an application.
So, a brief outline of the code I have is here. I actually wrote a smaller app to test my ideas out before applying them to something more complex.
I started in XCode with a Swift document based application for Mac OSX.
In ViewController.swift I have:
import Cocoa
class ViewController: NSViewController {
var myText = "Hello, some text"
#IBOutlet weak var textView1: NSTextField!
#IBAction func Button1(_ sender: Any) {
myText = "This is button 1 clicked"
myText = setText( thisText: &myText )
textView1.stringValue = myText
}
#IBAction func Button2(_ sender: Any) {
print("Button 2")
myText = "This is button 2 clicked"
textView1.stringValue = myText
}
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
// Do any additional setup after loading the view.
textView1.stringValue = myText
}
override func viewDidAppear() {
let document = self.view.window?.windowController?.document as! Document
}
override var representedObject: Any? {
didSet {
// Update the view, if already loaded.
}
}
}
In SetText.swift, I have this:
import Foundation
func setText( thisText: inout String) -> String {
thisText = "Function"
return thisText
}
I liked the idea of sending variables to the Set Text function and then returning it, but thinking about it more makes me think that actually this could end up like a proverbial bowl of spaghetti with functions calling functions and who know what else. So I was thinking that something like this would probably make more sense:
import Foundation
func setText( thisText: inout String) {
let vc = ViewController()
// Read the variable from View Controller
var myTextHere = vc.myText
myTextHere = myTextHere + " More text"
// Set the variable in ViewController here
vc.myText = myTextHere
}
From my reading around on this subject, if I call ViewController(), it will create anew instance of the view (is that right, or am I misreading?). That’s already happened, so what I need is to reference the ViewController that called the function setText, or rather that owns that particular instance of code. As I’m thinking about a document based application, I’d obviously want to keep all instances of myText with each document’s ViewController.
My aim is to create something a bit more complex, using a variable based on a Struct to keep everything together. So:
myCard.image // holds a bitmap image
myCard.size // holds the size of the image
And so on. being able to access it in the form of ViewController().myCard to both read and write to is what I am thinking I need to do.
What I don’t want to do is use global variables.
Thanks.
I'm having a hard time seeing much correlation between the title of your question and the body of your question. In fact, I'm not even entirely sure that there's a question being asked. That said, I'll try to address the questions you appear to be asking (re-written how I think they're intended):
When you initialize a new view controller, does it create a new view?
Yes. There is a view property for every view controller, and it's not a shared component or a singleton or anything else like that. There is one main view for every view controller. It's almost certainly composed of dozens of other subviews, but there is one view that is the view for every view controller.
Is there a way to get metadata about the state of a view controller from outside, preferably in the form of a struct?
Absolutely. First, you'd need to define that Card struct. I'd recommend doing it in the same file as the view controller itself. You can define it outside of the view controller, or if you want stricter coupling and namespacing, you can do it inside the view controller. Just be aware that doing that latter would mean that the type name, when referenced outside the view controller, would be ViewController.Card rather than just Card.
Then you'd want to create either a computed property (var card: Card) or a method (func card() -> Card) on your view controller which builds and returns one of those based on the state. It sounds like you're already leaning toward the property approach.
Note: I would absolutely advise against having one that is a normal get/set property because then you'd have to constantly update it and modify it. The best thing to do is have a computed property which builds it on the fly. So when the property is called, it reaches into all your components to get the info you want (like image sizes, strings, etc) and then packages up and hands off the Card metadata struct. Doing it on-demand like this eliminates unnecessary complexity and consolidates the metadata logic into one place.
Some dangerous things in your code example:
I can't think of a good reason to implement viewDidAppear() but not call super.viewDidAppear(). Unless you have an enormously compelling reason to leave that out (I honestly can't think of a single one), do not do so.
I don't see any good reason for your first implementation of your setText(thisText:) method. The way you use it in your Button1(_ sender: Any) IBAction functionally does absolutely nothing. That method in general is screwy for several reasons: it's got an upper-case method name, sets the textView text by trying to assign to stringValue for some super strange reason, and does in three lines what could be done in one:
textView1.text = "This is button 1 clicked"
The second implementation of setText(thisText:) makes even less sense than the previous. The two biggest problems being 1) that you don't even use the thisText argument passed in, and 2) your method, which is called 'set text' is creating a whole new view controller every single time it gets called? That's a huge violation of "doing what it says on the tin." Methods should have a single responsibility and shouldn't do anything beyond that responsibility. I'd never in a million years look at a method called setText and think "I'll bet this initializes a view controller." Never.
I see this question has already been downvoted a bit (not by me), and I'd like to take a moment to coach you in using Stack Overflow: Ask clear, concise, specific questions about clear, concise, specific topics. As I said at the top of my answer, there doesn't appear to be a question anywhere in your post. I had to kind of make some up that I inferred from what you wrote.
Remember: coding isn't just wiggling your fingers while you think about an app. If you're doing the hard work of good engineering, you'll likely spend a ratio of about 10:1 (or more!) of staring at your screen to actually typing any code. Every time you write a line of code, you should be asking yourself, "Why am I writing this line of code? Is this necessary? Am I reinventing the wheel?)
Good luck!
I've a NSDocument and it saves and read some data. I'd like to use these data in my ViewController. How can I access it? I haven't found any information about doing this in swift, only in obj-c but when I translated it into swift it always fails.
More precisely:
I have a dictionary(my property of Document) which stores all data - I save from this dictionary and read to it. And I'd like to access this property(dictionary) from ViewController.
I found a solution:
(self.view.window?.windowController?.document as! Document).arch.objectForKey("saved")
And what is important - call it in viewWillAppear!
I apologise if this has been asked before but I can't find the info I need.
Basically I want a UITableView to be populated using info from a server, similar to the SeismicXML example. I have the parser as a separate object, is it correct to alloc, init an instance of that parser & then tell RootViewController to make it's table data source a copy of the parser's array.
I can't include code because I haven't written anything yet, I'm just trying to get the design right before I start. Perhaps something like:
xmlParser = [[XMLParser alloc] init];
[xmlParser getXMLData];
// Assuming xmlParser stores results in an array called returnedArray
self.tableDataSource = xmlParser.returnedArray
Is this the best way of doing it?
No, you don't want to do this. You don't want your view controller directly accessing the array of the data-model. This would work in the technical sense but it would be fragile and likely to fail as the project scaled.
As the projects grow in complexity, you will want to increasingly wrap your data model object (in this case the xmlParser) in protective layers of methods to control and verify how the data model changes. Eventually, you will have projects with multiple views, multiple view controllers as well as information entering from both the user and URLs. You need to get into the habit of using the data-model object not just a dumb store you dump stuff into but as an active manager and verifier of your data.
In a situation like this I would have my data-model's array completely wrapped by making it a #protected or #private property. Then I would have dedicated methods for fetching or inserting data into the actual array inside the data-model class itself. No objects outside of the data-model should actually have direct access to the array or have knowledge of its indexes.
So, in this case your data-model would have something like:
- (NSString *) textForLineAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *) anIndexPath{
//... do bounds checking for the index
NSString *returnString=[self.privateArray objectAtIndex:anIndexPath.row];
if (returnString=='sometest'){
return returnString;
}
return #""; //return an empty string so the reciever won't nil out and crash
}
as well as a setTextForLineAtPath: method for setting the line if you need that.
The general instructional materials do not spend enough (usually none) time talking about the data-model but the data-model is actually the core of the program. It is where the actual logic of the application resides and therefore it should be one of the most complex and thoroughly tested class in your project.
A good data-model should be interface agnostic i.e. it should work with a view based interface, a web based interface or even the command line. It should neither know nor care that its data will be displayed in a tableview or any other interface element or type.
When I start a new project, the first thing I do is comment out the '[window makeKeyAndVisible];' in the app delegate. Then I create my data-model class and test it old-school by loading data and logging the outputs. Only when it works exactly how I wish it to do I then proceed to the user interface.
So, think real hard about what you want the app to do on an abstract level. Encode that logic in a custom class. Isolate the data from all direct manipulation from any other object. Verify all inputs to the data before committing.
It sounds like a lot of work and it is. It feels like overkill for a small project and in many cases it is. However, getting the habit early will pay big dividends very quickly as your apps grow in complexity.
Not quite. You want the data source to be an object that implements the UITableViewDataSource protocol; what I would do in this situation is create an object that implements that protocol and parses XML, so that you can alloc-init it, then set the data source to that object and have it update the table view as appropriate. So based off your code (and assuming you're running within the table view's controller):
XMLParserAndDataSource xpads = [[XMLParserAndDataSource alloc] init];
[xpads getXMLData];
self.tableView.dataSource = xpads;
It's probably a good idea to give this class itself a reference to an NSXMLParser object, so you can use that to parse the XML, then provide convenience methods (like getXMLData) as well as the UITableViewDataSource methods for your own use. (If you go this route, you should also make your XMLParserAndDataSource class implement the more useful of the NSXMLParser delegate methods, and use them as appropriate to update your table view.)
I'm a Mac programmer and not an iPhone programmer; but on the mac,
self.tableDataSource = xmlParser.returnedArray is not correct. You are supposed to either bind the table's content to an Array Controller (if iPhone has one?) or set the datasource outlet to your RootViewController.
In your rootview controller, you would implement the methods:
– tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:
– tableView:numberOfRowsInSection:
For – tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: you would return a UITableViewCell with the data you received from the XML parsing according to the index path like so:
UITableCell *myCell = [UITableCell new];
myCell.textLabel.text = [parsedXMLArray objectAtIndex:[indexPath indexAtPosition:indexPath.length-1]];
return myCell;
(Something people don't know is that you can use the + new class method on all NSObject subclasses which automatically call alloc/init.)
For – tableView:numberOfRowsInSection just return the count of the data array:
return parsedXMLArray.count;
Can't edit my question nor post replies, can only post my response as answer.
#TechZen: I'm somebody who tries to form analogies, helps me understand. What you're saying is something like: My original idea was like going into the file room & dumping all the originals on my desk to work on where as you suggest the object be more like an organised file clerk who will search through the data for me and only return the specific datum that I need while being the only one with direct access to that data.
Have I understood correctly?
#Tim: What if I later need the parser to get data for something which is not a table? That's why I thought to dump it into an array & let the caller decide what to do with the data. Would you suggest a second object that would supply the data in the newly required form? (Am I sort of one the right track here or way off?)