Loyal readers of this blog may have noticed a decrease in post frequency since January 2023. The reason for this decrease is that I spent most of 2023 creating a video course, iOSExpert. This post describes iOSExpert and presents some learnings from the creation process.

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In a recent post, I presented an approach for succeeding on take-home iOS-developer coding challenges. (For brevity, I henceforth refer to these particular coding challenges as “coding challenges”.) The model solution in that post used UIKit because, at the time I wrote the post, I had already completed coding challenges using that framework. But SwiftUI may be a good, or indeed the best, option.

My goal in this post is to help readers who are are considering or have been assigned a SwiftUI-based coding challenge.

This post presents factors for the UIKit-or-SwiftUI decision. This post then addresses certain challenges posed by a SwiftUI solution, including architecture, dependency injection, testing, image caching, and Identifiable.

In the course of discussing these considerations and challenges, this post introduces a SwiftUI model solution, KatFancy, and uses that solution for illustrative purposes.

To derive maximum benefit from this post, readers should review the original post before reading this one. Most of the content of that post is relevant to all coding challenges.

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URLSession “and related classes provide an API for downloading data from … endpoints indicated by URLs.” Most iOS developers are familiar with using the URLSession singleton, shared, which has “reasonable default behavior”, including retrieving data from the actual endpoint represented by the URL specified.

But using shared in all circumstances has some drawbacks.

1. In a production app, during development of a new feature, the endpoint may not exist until late in the development cycle. Using shared means that development of the client-side UI of a new feature is blocked until development of the endpoint is complete.
2. Because using shared necessarily involves network access, use of shared in unit tests can cause those unit tests to be slow or to fail altogether.
3. The endpoint may not return the data needed to exercise all functionality of the app. For example, the app may have a special no-data-was-retrieved state, but if the actual endpoint has data, this state can’t be triggered.

This post presents a solution to these three problems: using a stubbed version of URLSession and using alternate URL variants, both via dependency injection.

Paul Hudson described the URLSession-stubbing technique in this excellent article. My post contains two refinements to his article, both described in the section Acknowledgement.

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