CT15 / Movies

🎥 Sample iOS Project with MVVM Architectural Pattern

iOS MVVM Exploration in Swift

This is my first attempt at applying the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architectural pattern for iOS development:

• The binding between the View and the ViewModel is done through the use of property observer didSet and closures.
• Unlike most - if not all - of the MVVM tutorial projects out there, I create the View programmatically (no storyboard).

In this project, I also ...

• parse JSON data from a local file all_movies.json
• embed UICollectionView inside UITableView

Application Overview

iOS application that displays "movies" (you will know why after running the application) based on their categories / genres.

Code Structure Overview

While iOS MVVM architecture usually combines View and ViewController to be the View component of MVVM, I make a slight distinction between the two of them:

• View takes care of the UI elements' appearances (attributes and layouts).
• ViewController (Controller) acts as the data source and delegate to UITableView and UICollectionView.
• ViewController (Controller) takes care of user interaction.
• ViewController (Controller) has reference to both View and ViewModel.
• View does not have reference to ViewController.

Reflection

The application includes UICollectionView that is embedded inside UITableView. Without storyboard, I need to set the height of the UITableView and UICollectionView programmatically through their respective delegate methods. This causes some problem when I attempt to bind UITableView and UICollectionView to their respective delegates and data sources (AllMoviesViewController) reactively using RxSwift.

While the data source and delegate binding is taken care of by RxSwift, .bind() method does not take into consideration the width and height of the UITableView and UICollectionView. Hence, I am not able to set the height of UITableView and UICollectionView. This is, however, not a problem if storyboard is used for the layouts of UI elements are specified there.

Even though I do experiment with RxSwift and RxCocoa a little bit in this project, I do not focus too much on them. I am sure that there is a way / workaround to solve this issue, but I will leave that research for another project.

Additional Note

The application UI is not iPhone X compatible because safeAreaLayoutGuide is not used when coding the UI elements layouts. It works fine with other iPhone and iPad simulators.