ThunderCollection

A wrapper around UICollectionViewController enabling a declarative API around it's delegate methods using protocols.

Programming language: Swift

License: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later

Tags: UI     Collection View    

Latest version: v1.3.0

README

Thunder Collection

[](LICENSE.md)

Thunder Collection is a useful framework which enables quick and easy creation of collection views in iOS using a declarative approach. It makes the process of creating complex collection views as simple as a few lines of code; and removes the necessity for having long chains of index paths and if statements.

How It Works

Thunder Collection comprises of two main types of objects:

Items

Collection items are objects that conform to the CollectionItemDisplayable protocol, this protocol has properties such as: cellClass, selectionHandler which are responsible for defining how the cell is configured. As this is a protocol any object can conform to it, which allows you to simply send an array of model objects to the collection view to display your content.

Sections

Collection sections are objects that conform to the CollectionSectionDisplayable protocol, most of the time you won't need to implement this protocol yourself as Thunder Collection has a convenience class CollectionSection which can be used in most circumstances. However you can implement more complex layouts using this protocol on your own classes.

Installation

Setting up your app to use ThunderCollection is a simple and quick process. You can choose between a manual installation, or use Carthage.

Carthage

• Add github "3sidedcube/ThunderCollection" == 1.3.1 to your Cartfile.
• Run carthage update --platform ios to fetch the framework.
• Drag ThunderCollection into your project's Linked Frameworks and Libraries section from the Carthage/Build folder.
• Add the Build Phases script step as defined here.

Manual

• Clone as a submodule, or download this repo
• Import ThunderCollection.xcproject into your project
• Add ThunderCollection.framework to your Embedded Binaries.
• Wherever you want to use ThunderCollection use import ThunderCollection.

Code Example

A Simple Collection View Controller

Setting up a collection view is massively simplified using thunder collection, in fact, we can get a simple collection view running with just a few lines of code. To create a custom collection view we subclass from CollectionViewController. We then set up our collection view in the viewDidLoad: method. In contrast to ThunderCollection no default implementations of CollectionItemDisplayable are provided, as there is no standard implementation of UICollectionViewCell like there is with UITableViewCell.

import ThunderCollection

class MyCollectionViewController: CollectionViewController {

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        // ImageRow not provided by framework!
        let imageRow = ImageRow(image: someImage)

        let section = CollectionSection(rows: [imageRow])
        data = [section]
    }
}

Building Binaries for Carthage

Since Xcode 12 there has been issues with building Carthage binaries caused by the inclusion of a secondary arm64 slice in the generated binary needed for Apple Silicon on macOS. This means that rather than simply using carthage build --archive you need to use the ./carthage-build build --archive command which uses the script included with this repo. For more information, see the issue on Carthage's github here

We will be investigating moving over to use SPM as an agency soon, and will also look into migrating to use .xcframeworks as soon as Carthage have support for it.

License

See [LICENSE.md](LICENSE.md)