Issue #40

Hi there,
Welcome to the 40th edition of  iOS Code Review! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year. I'm wishing that 2023 will be a better year than the last.
In this issue, I have a variety of tips to share with you. I hope you enjoy the reading!

Ordered dictionary anyone?

Did you know that Swift has an official package with ordered versions of our well-known data structures: OrderedDictionary and OrderedSet? They live in a separate SPM package because the Swift core team decided that such components should live in separate packages until they are deemed worthy of inclusion in the standard library.

GitHub - apple/swift-collections: Commonly used data structures for Swift

Commonly used data structures for Swift. Contribute to apple/swift-collections development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubapple

OrderedDictionary In Swift

Learn how and when to use OrderedDictionary, provided by the swift-collections package, in Swift.

Advanced SwiftRobert Pieta

Using Label in SwiftUI

Whenever we want to show an icon and text together, Label comes to the rescue. It supports accessibility out of the box, and offers the ability to easily hide the icon or text using the modifier .labelStyle(.iconOnly) , while preserving the accessibility information.

SwiftUI Label: A standard way to label user interface items | Sarunw

A label might seem trivial, but it plays an important role in SwiftUI. Let’s learn about this simple view.

Sarunw

Accessibility of images in SwiftUI

On a related note, we can enrich images with accessibility text in another way - by simply providing a localizable string with the image name as a key. It works out of the box, with no additional modifiers needed on the image 😍

Image accessibility labels from Localizable.strings files

When we add an image name to a Localizable.strings file, SwiftUI automatically uses it for the image accessibility label.

Nil CoalescingNatalia Panferova

Better XCTest failure messages

When we use XCTAssertNil(sut.optionalProperty), the failure message in case of assert failing will be not so helpful - "XCTAssertNil failed". By using XCTAssertEqual(sut.optionalProperty, nil) instead, we will get the actual value of the property in the failure message.
A few more suggestions on asserting optionals better, shared by Jon Reid:

How to Unit Test Optionals in Swift | Quality Coding

You have a Swift optional value. How can you write an XCTest assertion to verify it, while getting the most from assertion failure messages?

Quality CodingJon Reid

Accessing view controller's view

UIViewController's view is lazy, created the first time .view is accessed. When we want to access it without triggering the lazy creation, only getting the view if it already exists - there's viewIfLoaded property. Available since 2015, shared by Peter in 2019, and I saw this yesterday, in 2023 😅

✌️
Alright, that's it for today! Thank you to dataTile for Simulator for sponsoring this issue.
I'm curious if you found one of the tips particulary interesting - let me know by replying to this email!