codeforlife-ios

Design Structure

View Controllers and Delegates

Each view controller has its own delegate. In the current implementation, GameViewControllerDelegate is a concrete delegate which implements all the delegate protocols for other view controllers.

When adding functionality for each view controllers, try to extend the content in the delegate instead of creating dependency between view controllers. This will allow easier addition of new features.

Request

Framework

Structure

A concrete Request class must contains :

1. Url of the request(Be it for development or deployment)
2. Http method
3. List of parameters
4. Mode(A class which identifies whether the application is testing using MockDelegates, in development, or in deployment)
5. execute(callback: (() -> Void)?), a function which indicates what to perform under different Mode
6. processData(dada: NSData), a function to handle the data processing after results are fetched. (N.B. the data are mostly in JSON format)

Animation

The game currently does not have its own game logic to check result. Game logic checking is instead handled by communicating with the web version of the game via javascript. By using Webkit, with a specific parameter in the url, javascript will return a json string to be analysed. The analysis is handled by GameViewInteractionHandler, which will translate the JSON to an [[Animation]] instance. This object is then passed to a AnimationHandler instance to execute the animations.

An Animation is nothing more than an object containing an action(or a set of actions). However most actions have been refactored to become delegate functions in corresponding view controller delegates.

GameScene

All the media files are originated from the web version, images in SVG format, audios in mp3 format. SVGs are not supported by XCode, although there exists a pod called SVGKit, exporting the images to png format makes it much easier to configure.

SpriteKit is an framework which is supposed to replace SceneKit, both are graphic rendering frameworks for iOS. Without deep understanding about SceneKit, hardly can I comment on the advantages or disadvantages of them. SpriteKit was chosenly solely on the reason that SpriteKit is newer and seems more sophisticated.

GameMapViewController displays a MapScene which contains a WorldNode(i.e an SKNode representing the 'World') and the WorldNode contains a CameraNode(i.e. another SKNode which represent the camera, deciding which part of the world to show on screen)

Try to avoid temperting classes under GameScenes/Objects, especially the superclass and Roads. To fit the images from the web version of the game, a lot of magic numbers have been include to tweak the map so as to display the corrent items at almost correct positions.

Testing

This project was created when Swift 1.2 was the latest stable version, which does not contain a UI testing tool. Several testing frameworks had been included in this project to provide both unit tests and UI tests.

XCTest

The original testing framework introduced by Apple is mainly used for testing struct. While it is not as human-readable as Quick, this framework comes in handy when it comes to basic struct tests. Reason behind is that for Quick to compare equality, one class must implement equatable and struct cannot inherit any class, this leaves the code to become this style

expect(Coordinates(1.2)).to(BeEqual(Coordinates(1,2))     // Does not compile, Coordinates does not inherit equatable
expect(Coordinates(1,2) == Coordinates(1,2)).to(BeTrue()) // Compile, but not as readable as the above one

FAQ - Common Problems encountered

When running unit test with XCTest, the test crash saying it cannot cast certain view controller from codeforlife-ios._viewController to codeforlife-iosTests._viewController

In Swift 1.1: Instantiating view controller from Storyboard can be achieved by the following code

let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: NSBundle.mainBundle())
let viewController = storyboard.instantiateInitialViewController() as! LaunchScreenViewController

Make sure you use NSBundle.mainBundle() instead of nil Also make sure in that view controller class, include codeforlife-iosTests as a target Another way is to use the method below

In Swift 1.2(works in Swift 1.1 as well): Apple has introduced a tighten access control rules to follow. Above code will produce runtime errors about difficulty casting one class to another. Solution follows:

1. Exclude viewcontroller as a target for codeforlife-iosTests
2. Declare the class to be tested public

N.B. If you have to change certain private variables to public just for the sake of testing, that is code smell. Refactor until you no longer EVEN think about testing a private function

Compiler Error: XCTest Library not loaded in codefoelife-ios

Make sure in the pod file, all libraries (e.g. KIF and Quick) which depend on XCTest are only targeting codeforlife-iosTests instead of both codeforlife-iosTest and codeforlife-ios.

//pods do not require XCT go here
target 'codeforlife-iosTests' do
    //pods require XCTest go here
end

The compiler is trying to include those libraries in codeforlife-ios but XCTest is not include codeforlife-ios hence the error.