If you're a programmer looking for a job it's very likely that you'll have to do a coding interview at some point. Every company conducts these interviews differently. Some may have you work through several heavy computer science problems, others may present you with a task that's related to the job you're interviewing for and others might do both. No matter what the exact form is, you'll want to nail these interviews as they are a big part of whether you'll get an offer or not. In my career, I haven't had to go through extensive coding interviews myself. That's...

When writing iOS apps, we regularly run into code that is asynchronous. Sometimes you know you're writing something that will run asynchronously and other times you're passing a completion handler to code that may or may not run asynchronously on a different dispatch queue. If you're familiar with using DispatchQueue.main, you have probably written code like this: DispatchQueue.main.async { // do something } And while writing this, you may have encountered a second method on DispatchQueue.main called sync. In this week's post I will explain the difference between sync and async, and you will learn when you might want to...

A common use of a Core Data store is to cache data from a remote resource locally to support offline functionality of an app. There are multiple ways to implement a caching mechanism and many of them don't involve Core Data. For example, you could simply fetch a JSON file from a server and store the contents of that JSON file on disk. A downside of fetching a full data set every time is that you risk using a lot of bandwidth, especially if your data set is large, or if your data set is expected to grow over time....

Every once in a while I look at a feature in Swift and I fall down a rabbit hole to explore it so I can eventually write about it. The OptionSet protocol is one of these Swift features. If you've ever written an animation and passed it a list of options like this, you have already used OptionSet: UIView.animate( withDuration: 0.6, delay: 0, options: [.allowUserInteraction, .curveEaseIn], animations: { myView.layer.opacity = 0 }, completion: { _ in }) You may not have realized that you weren't passing an array to the options parameter, and that's not surprising. After all, the options...

When you've added Core Data to your SwiftUI project and you have some data stored in your database, the next hurdle is to somehow fetch that data from your Core Data store and present it to the user. In this week's post, I will present two different ways that you can use to retrieve data from Core Data and present it in your SwiftUI application. By the end of this post you will be able to: Fetch data using the @FetchRequest property wrapper Expose data to your SwiftUI views with an observable object and an @Published property. Since @FetchRequest is...

If you've ever wanted to decode a bunch of JSON data into NSManagedObject instances you've probably noticed that this isn't a straightforward exercise. With plain structs, you can conform your struct to Codable and you convert the struct from and to JSON data automatically. For an NSManagedObject subclass it's not that easy. If your Core Data data model is configured to automatically generate your entity class definitions for you (which is the default), you may have tried to write the following code to conform your managed object to Decodable: extension MyManagedObject: Decodable { } If you do this, the compiler...

Unit testing is an important skill in the toolbox of any engineer. Knowing how to write a reliable, robust test suite helps you write reliable and robust code. If you've followed my introduction to unit testing part one and part two, or if you're experienced with unit testing you know that your tests should run isolated from any other tests. You also know that you should make sure that your test relies on as few external dependencies as possible. When you want to test your Core Data code, it might not be immediately obvious how you can test your Core...

In Xcode 12 you can create projects that no longer use an AppDelegate and SceneDelegate to manage the application lifecycle. Instead, we can use Swift's new @main annotation to turn a struct that conforms to the App protocol into the main entry point for our applications. When you create a new project in Xcode 12, you have the option to use the SwiftUI App application lifecycle for your SwiftUI project. While Xcode 12 beta 5 introduces an option to include Core Data in your SwiftUI application when you create a new project, you might have an existing SwiftUI project that...

As developers, we constantly deal with layers of abstractions that make our lives easier. We have abstractions over low level networking operations that allow us to make network calls with URLSession. Core Data provides an abstraction over data persistence that can be used to store information in an sqlite database. And there are many, many more abstractions that we all use every day. Over the past few weeks I have seen many people ask about using Core Data in pure SwiftUI projects created in Xcode 12. These projects no longer require an App- and SceneDelegate, and the checkbox to add...

The quickest way to handle deeplinks in your app is through the onOpenURL(perform:) view modifier which has been available since iOS 14. It allows developers to register a URL handler on their views so they can respond to URLs by modifying state for their views as needed. In this post, we'll cover all the steps involved in setting up your app to handle deeplinks. We'll start with explaining what deeplinks are, and then we'll configure an Xcode project to allow your app to handle incoming deeplinks. Note that we won't cover setting up Universal Links in this post; we'll solely...