Follow along at https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/42.
This day covers the first part of Project 10: Names and Faces in Hacking with Swift.
I have a separate repository where I've been creating projects alongside the material in the book. And you can find Project 10 here. However, I also copied it over to this day's folder so I could extend from where I left off.
With that in mind, Day 42 focuses on several specific topics:
- Designing UICollectionView cells
- UICollectionView data sources
To the extent that table views are... well... tables with rows, collection views are conceptually closer to grids with panels (or panes).
Which is great when we have a list of content whose items can be represented by an image or a graphic or a thumbnail.
Furthermore, richer content display can be a good reason to make a custom cell class — so this was a good opportunity to design a PersonCell class, which, being a Cocoa Touch Class, is just as capable of holding IB connections as our containing view controller.
Architecturally, implementing the common methods of UICollectionViewDelegate is very similar to doing so for UITableViewDelegate. For our purposes here, we're using collectionView(_:numberOfItemsInSection:), collectionView(_:cellForItemAt:), and collectionView(_:didSelectItemAt:).
🔑 One caveat is that we need to have collectionView(_:cellForItemAt:) locate an instance of our custom PersonCell (if we want our view controller to pass data to it, which is what we're doing here). Using .dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier:) straight-up returns a UICollectionViewCell, so we need to help the compiler out with a bit of casting:
guard let cell = collectionView
.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: StoryboardID.personCell, for: indexPath) as? PersonCell
else {
fatalError("Unable to dequeue person cell")
}