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Combine: Asynchronous Programming with Swift

Second Edition · iOS 14 · Swift 5.3 · Xcode 12

Before You Begin

Section 0: 3 chapters
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Section I: Introduction to Combine

Section 1: 2 chapters
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Section II: Operators

Section 2: 6 chapters
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Section III: Combine in Action

Section 3: 6 chapters
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Section IV: Advanced Combine

Section 4: 5 chapters
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Section V: Building a Complete App

Section 5: 2 chapters
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9. Networking
Written by Florent Pillet

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As programmers, a lot of what we do revolves around networking. Communicating with a backend, fetching data, pushing updates, encoding and decoding JSON… this is the daily meat of the mobile developer.

Combine offers a few select APIs to help perform common tasks declaratively. These APIs revolve around two key components of modern applications:

  • URLSession.
  • JSON encoding and decoding through the Codable protocol.

URLSession extensions

URLSession is the recommended way to perform network data transfer tasks. It offers a modern asynchronous API with powerful configuration options and fully transparent backgrounding support. It supports a variety of operations such as:

  • Data transfer tasks to retrieve the content of a URL.
  • Download tasks to retrieve the content of a URL and save it to a file.
  • Upload tasks to upload files and data to a URL.
  • Stream tasks to stream data between two parties.
  • Websocket tasks to connect to websockets.

Out of these, only the first one, data transfer tasks, exposes a Combine publisher. Combine handles these tasks using a single API with two variants, taking a URLRequest or just a URL.

Here‘s a look at how you can use this API:

guard let url = URL(string: "https://mysite.com/mydata.json") else { 
  return 
}

// 1
let subscription = URLSession.shared
  // 2
  .dataTaskPublisher(for: url)
  .sink(receiveCompletion: { completion in
    // 3
    if case .failure(let err) = completion {
      print("Retrieving data failed with error \(err)")
    }
  }, receiveValue: { data, response in
    // 4
    print("Retrieved data of size \(data.count), response = \(response)")
  })

Here‘s what‘s happening with this code:

  1. It‘s crucial that you keep the resulting subscription; otherwise, it gets immediately canceled and the request never executes.
  2. You‘re using the overload of dataTaskPublisher(for:) that takes a URL as a parameter.
  3. Make sure you always handle errors! Network connections are prone to failure.
  4. The result is a tuple with both a Data object and a URLResponse.

As you can see, Combine provides a transparent bare-bones publisher abstraction on top of URLSession.dataTask, only exposing a publisher instead of a closure.

Codable support

The Codable protocol is a modern, powerful and Swift-only encoding and decoding mechanism that you absolutely should know about. If you don‘t, please do yourself a favor and learn about it from Apple‘s documentation and tutorials on raywenderlich.com!

let subscription = URLSession.shared
  .dataTaskPublisher(for: url)
  .tryMap { data, _ in
    try JSONDecoder().decode(MyType.self, from: data)
  }
  .sink(receiveCompletion: { completion in
    if case .failure(let err) = completion {
      print("Retrieving data failed with error \(err)")
    }
  }, receiveValue: { object in
    print("Retrieved object \(object)")
  })

.map(\.data)
.decode(type: MyType.self, decoder: JSONDecoder())

Publishing network data to multiple subscribers

Every time you subscribe to a publisher, it starts doing work. In the case of network requests, this means sending the same request multiple times if multiple subscribers need the result.

let url = URL(string: "https://www.raywenderlich.com")!
let publisher = URLSession.shared
// 1
  .dataTaskPublisher(for: url)
  .map(\.data)
  .multicast { PassthroughSubject<Data, URLError>() }

// 2
let subscription1 = publisher
  .sink(receiveCompletion: { completion in
    if case .failure(let err) = completion {
      print("Sink1 Retrieving data failed with error \(err)")
    }
  }, receiveValue: { object in
    print("Sink1 Retrieved object \(object)")
  })

// 3
let subscription2 = publisher
  .sink(receiveCompletion: { completion in
    if case .failure(let err) = completion {
      print("Sink2 Retrieving data failed with error \(err)")
    }
  }, receiveValue: { object in
    print("Sink2 Retrieved object \(object)")
  })

// 4
let subscription = publisher.connect()

Key points

  • Combine offers a publisher-based abstraction for its dataTask(with:completionHandler:) method called dataTaskPublisher(for:).
  • You can decode Codable-conforming models using the built-in decode operator on a publisher that emits Data values.
  • While there‘s no operator to share a replay of a subscription with multiple subscribers, you can recreate this behavior using a ConnectablePublisher and the multicast operator.

Where to go from here?

Great job on going through this chapter!

8. In Practice: Project "Collage"
10. Debugging
Have a technical question? Want to report a bug? You can ask questions and report bugs to the book authors in our official book forum here.
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