Top-notch video tutorials for Swift developers

Keeping files and databases compatible with changing versions of your code can be challenging. As you add new features to your app, your data modeling needs may change, which can break when processing data created on earlier versions of the app. To handle this, we use migrations, which help migrate the data from one version of the app to another. This episode will show how to accomplish this using a new framework called Monarch.

In this episode, we create a form to create songs from our API by implementing a create route. We use a payload struct to normalize and validate user input for song title and artist name. We also ensure that duplicate artists are not created by using a custom comparison method. Finally, we create the artist and song in the database and return the newly created song. We also configure the JSON output to use snake case instead of camelcase for our default encoder and decoder for our Vapor app.

In this episode we introduce a new open source library called Swift Coding that takes all of these concepts and wraps it up into a Swift Package you can use in your own projects. We give a tour of what the library can do and how you can use it.

When working with Codable models, everything is great until you deviate even slightly from the normal behavior. Doing so requires you to drop down to a more manual approach where you have to define your own CodingKeys enum and encode/decode methods. In this episode we will look at a 3rd party set of property wrappers that give you some handy Codable functionality for free.

You may encounter a scenario where you want to decode some JSON that contains an array of objects that may be of a different type. In this episode we examine such a scenario, where we have a feed that contains an array of posts, but each post object can be of a different kind, such as text, image, or video. We will take a look at how to solve this by introducing a protocol called DecodableClassFamily, and along with a Discriminator that will inform the decoding logic which type it should decode. We'll then take this working example and make a reusable solution using Swift Generics.

In this episode we take the response from the top podcasts feed and decode the JSON into models using Codable.

In this episode we talk about testing requests against a real API. For this we will build an app called CoinList that leverages the Crypto Compare API to fetch stats about crypto currencies.

In this episode we continue with our caching example, this time introducing a new type that will handle the caching for us, as well as wrapping the response type into a new type that will indicate to the view controller if the response was served from the cache or from the network. We end the episode by implementing Equatable so that our store can avoid needless double callbacks if the data has not changed.

In a recent project I leveraged the Codable protocol to save API responses to disk to make the application more responsive (and to have an offline mode). I was happy with the results. In this episode we will add some caching to an existing application, saving JSON responses to the caches directory on the device.

Codable is a great API, but sometimes real APIs can be tricky to model. In this episode we’ll examine a real use case of an API that returns a collection of elements, each of them similar but specified by a type. We’ll leverage Codable and inheritance to create a representation of this structure and show how you can peek into the container in order to determine what type to decode.

We tackle some more complex (read: realistic) scenarios where the JSON structure doesn’t quite match the structure of the objects. We’ll do this by providing custom implementations of Encodable and Decodable, talk about keyed and unkeyed containers, and how you might be able to transform the date during the encoding process

Swift 4 finally answers the long-debated question of: How should I parse JSON with Swift? In this episode we'll take a look at the new Codable protocol in Swift 4, and talk about how to use JSONEncoder and JSONDecoder to serialize your objects into JSON and back again.

In this episode we start writing an application-specific API Client. We use Argo to decode our JSON response into an Episode model, including some nested object decoding, date formatting, and wrap it up by testing the implementation to make sure it works.

In this episode I start creating a reusable api client that will make it a lot easier to consume a JSON api and convert the response into model objects. It uses Argo for the JSON parsing, and leverages Swift features to provide a rich callback for the API calls.

In this episode we wrap up our JSON parsing exploration in Swift by extending the decoding to work with arrays. Doing so cleans up the extraction code significantly.

Parsing JSON (which provides no contracts or type guarantees) can be difficult and tedious in Swift. Many of the problems you are forced to deal with were easier to ignore in Objective-C, but that doesn't mean they weren't present. In this episode we'll take a look at a very manual approach to mapping from a JSON response to a Swift type.

In this episode we continue with our mantle example, this time binding the code to the UI. This involves mapping back to our mantle model for display on the cell, as well as responding to changes using the NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate protocol.

In this episode we go over a handy little model framework called Mantle. With Mantle we can easily get support for NSCoding, NSCopying, and JSON serialization for our model objects.