CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosswiftmodel-view-controllerdesign-patterns
yambo
yambo

Reputation: 1817

When following MVC design pattern what code should be in the UIViewController class file? - Swift4

I'm trying to understand how to properly implement MVC in swift. Heres my scenario:

I have a signup page with 9 UITextFields, and they're all being made programmatically, and therefore being anchored to the view programmatically. As you can imagine this would be a lot of repetitive code to have in the SignupViewController class file.

Is the convention when following MVC to keep the setup of these text fields in the SignupViewController file, or are you supposed to have a separate file such as SignupView that contains all the text field setup code?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 970

Answers (4)

savvas.pyth
savvas.pyth

Reputation: 23

After reading about good practices to write maintainable and readable code you should do the whole design in interface builder. If you get good understanding of constraints you don't need to write any code to setup design in your view controller. The ViewController.swift file should not be used to fetch-handle data or to setup the UI. It should just be responsible to display and update values which are fetched and get handled in a separate ViewControllerDatasource.swift file. So to sum up, view controller does not have any logic implemented it just handles the show data and the design updates(not setup). I hope i helped you with your question.

Upvotes: 0

Smartcat
Smartcat

Reputation: 2882

Even though UIViewController has the word "controller" in it, I believe the majority of iOS devs these days assign the UIViewController to the "View" side of MVC. The UIViewController is chiefly specific to a particular view only, plus may manage its subviews as well (until this gets too messy and a container view is added to allow for a nested UIViewController).

In MVC on iOS, the view controller can easily become polluted with business logic, model management, etc... which is why many people jokingly refer to "MVC" in iOS as "Massive View Controller". To combat this, consider using an MVVM architecture instead, which not only keeps the VCs small, but also moves the business logic out to a separate "sidecar" coupled to that ViewController, called a ViewModel. This allows the business logic to be unit tested without any UI involved, making testing much more reliable and easier to read and maintain. With that said, the creation of these 9 controls would still belong in the ViewController.

As for programmatically adding UITextFields to your view vs viewController, if this is to be done just for this single scene, then I'd stick it into the viewController. If you expect to want to reuse the set of them in other scenes, then making a custom view or control containing them would be better, like is typically done for custom cells of a table.

Finally, consider simply using a Nib or Storyboard to layout your scene. Apple has provided so much power to layout and maintain scenes via nibs and storyboards that you're really missing out to go the programmatic route. I find it very rare that I side with programmatic approach. The auto-layout warnings in InterfaceBuilder alone are worth gold to me, and as Apple continues to raise the bar and change layout rules, I can't imagine trying to keep up programmatically when I can't afford to test every device and iOS version combination. And yes, it's possible to do MVVM with dependency injection and storyboards. I do it daily.

Upvotes: 2

dniswhite
dniswhite

Reputation: 176

I don't agree with above statement about using Interface Builder... I prefer to write most of my views in code and also set the anchors that way as well.

to minimize the file you can create an extension of the ViewController in a separate file to contain all of this code.

so for SignupViewController you would create a new file called SignupViewController+SetupUI.swift.

import UIKit

extension SignupViewController {
    // add your setup methods here

    // as just an FYI you can call the methods you create from your
    // SignupViewController file just like you would any other method.
}

you can read more about extensions here.

Upvotes: 0

E.Coms
E.Coms

Reputation: 11531

Answer to your question is that it has nothing to do with MVC .

AS iOS/Mac developers, we use Interface builder and auto_layout to achieve most UI @IBOUtlet/ @IBAction. This is the V side of MVC.

Typically, If you have data, database, json or whatever formats, you need to model them and handle logics. That'M of MVC.

The C(Controller) side of MVC is a kind of glue between M and V. In most cases of mobile , you can think Controllers are all C you need.

So controller class is the only portion you need to put code to simplify everything.

In your case, 9 UITextfields should be ideally put into V side job. Please don't write code for them unless there is no better way to do.

Upvotes: 0

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