Sources of Truths

[ahmedk92]

(Originally published 2019-08-30)

It's not uncommon to see a variable in some codebase that looks like this:

var isAlertShown: Bool

Or:

var pageIndex: Int

Such variables are used in order to track some state. Let's see an example, a contrived one:

We are going to show an alert whenever the app receives a remote notification. But we want to avoid attempting to present a new one if an alert is already shown. So we are going to use a UIAlertController for this task. One may write code like this:

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    private var isAlertShown = false

    private func showAlert() {
        guard !isAlertShown else { return }
        let alert = UIAlertController(title: "New Message!", message: nil, preferredStyle: .alert)
        alert.addAction(UIAlertAction(title: "OK", style: .cancel, handler: { (_) in
            self.isAlertShown = false
        }))

        isAlertShown = true

        present(alert, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }
}

Here we're using isAlertShown to track the state telling if our alert is shown or not. We have to mutate this variable correctly to ensure it correctly represents the actual state of whether the alert is shown or not. However, if the alert got dismissed by any other mean than our cancel action, the variable isAlertShown will have a wrong value.

The reason is isAlertShown is not the source of truth. We can avoid such bug if we queried a fresh value from the ever-changing environment itself. For this particular example, we can check if the presentedViewController property is of type UIAlertController. Like this:

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    private var isAlertShown: Bool {
        return presentedViewController is UIAlertController
    }

    private func showAlert() {
        guard !isAlertShown else { return }

        let alert = UIAlertController(title: "New Message!", message: nil, preferredStyle: .alert)
        alert.addAction(UIAlertAction(title: "OK", style: .cancel, handler: nil))

        present(alert, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }
}

Alternatively, we can use a weak reference if we want to be sure that the presented alert is a particular one.

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    private weak var shownAlert: UIAlertController?

    private func showAlert() {
        guard shownAlert == nil else { return }

        let alert = UIAlertController(title: "New Message!", message: nil, preferredStyle: .alert)
        alert.addAction(UIAlertAction(title: "OK", style: .cancel, handler: nil))

        shownAlert = alert

        present(alert, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }
}

Once it's dismissed, by any means, the weak reference will be nil. No need for mutations.

Conclusion

So, I think the idea is clear now. Want to track the download status of some book? Infer it from the existence of the relevant files. Want to track the current index of a paged UICollectionView? Infer it from the relation of the contentOffset to the contentSize.

This principle is discussed on the web. However, it's more data (or database) oriented. So, I wanted to discuss it in a close-to-UI context, where we, iOS developers, spend a significant time.

Thanks for reading!