NachoSoto / Changeset

Minimal edits from one collection to another

Changeset

Changeset – pretty awesome little project
— Joel Levin

This is an attempt at implementing the solution outlined in Dave DeLong’s article, Edit distance and edit steps.

A Changeset describes the minimal edits required to go from one Collection of Equatable elements to another.

It has been written specifically to be used in conjunction with UITableView and UICollectionView data sources by detecting additions, deletions, substitutions, and moves between the two sets of data.

Usage

The following code computes the minimal edits of the canonical example, going from the Character collections “kitten” to “sitting”:

let changeset = Changeset(source: "kitten".characters, target: "sitting".characters)

print(changeset)
// 'kitten' -> 'sitting':
//     replace with s at index 0
//     replace with i at index 4
//     insert g at index 6

The following assertion would then succeed:

let edits = [
    Edit(.Substitution, value: "s", destination: 0),
    Edit(.Substitution, value: "i", destination: 4),
    Edit(.Insertion, value: "g", destination: 6),
]
assert(changeset.edits == edits)

If you don’t want the overhead of Changeset itself, which also stores the source and target collections, you can call edits directly (here with example data from Apple’s Table View Programming Guide for iOS):

let source = ["Arizona", "California", "Delaware", "New Jersey", "Washington"]
let target = ["Alaska", "Arizona", "California", "Georgia", "New Jersey", "Virginia"]
let edits = Changeset.edits(from: source, to: target)

print(edits)
// [insert Alaska at index 0, replace with Georgia at index 2, replace with Virginia at index 4]

UIKit Integration

The index values can be used directly in the animation blocks of beginUpdates/endUpdates on UITableView and performBatchUpdates on UICollectionView in that Changeset follows the principles explained under Batch Insertion, Deletion, and Reloading of Rows and Sections in Apple’s guide.

In short; first all deletions and substitutions are made, relative to the source collection, then, relative to the resulting collection, insertions. A move is just a deletion followed by an insertion.

In the iOS framework, two convenience extensions (one on UITableView and one on UICollectionView) have been included to make animated table/collection view updates a breeze. Just call update, like this:

tableView.update(with: changeset.edits)

Test App

The Xcode project also contains a target to illustrate the usage in an app:


This uses the extensions mentioned above to animate transitions based on the edits of a Changeset.

License

This project is available under The MIT License.
Copyright © 2015-16, Joachim Bondo. See LICENSE file.