It finally happened that Core Data was required for one of my Swift 2 projects, so naturally I turned to mogenerator to produce my human and machine NSManagedObject subclasses. However, I was unsatisfied with the results of the machine file\u2026particularly, the tendency of the template to clutter up the global namespace with enums for the attributes and relationships. Here’s the default template’s output for an entity named Category with a pair of attributes and one relationship.<\/p>\n
[gist https:\/\/gist.github.com\/JoshuaSullivan\/dbbe909dd08a0fbadb92 file=”Old Output Snippet.swift” \/]<\/p>\n
As you can see, it creates a pair of public enums to enumerate the names of the attributes and relationships. This isn’t too bad for one or two entities, but gets annoying when you have dozens of entities, each adding 2-4 new global-level types.<\/p>\n
Moreover, I have a problem with the use of the enum type. Yes, we are enumerating the possible attributes for this entity, but absolutely nothing in the Core Data framework will accept them; it’s purely string-based. As a result, anywhere you use the enum cases, you’ll have to tack on the .rawValue accessor to get the underlying string. I figured we could do better:<\/p>\n
[gist https:\/\/gist.github.com\/JoshuaSullivan\/dbbe909dd08a0fbadb92 file=”New Output Snippet.swift” \/]<\/p>\n
The way I chose to address the first issue is to move the declarations inside the class declaration for the entity. Since Swift supports name-spacing, this means that instead of typing “CategoryAttributes.id”, you’d type “Category.Attributes.id”. This is only 1 more character and it results in only “Category” being added to the global namespace.<\/p>\n
The second change I made was to convert the enums to structs with each of the entries being a static let string. The structs are never meant to be instantiated, they simply provide a coherent namespace for our attribute and relationship names.<\/p>\n
You can get the updated template files here: https:\/\/gist.github.com\/JoshuaSullivan\/2057f09cc18243a3f2df<\/a><\/p>\n More information about using custom mogenerator templates can be found in this Stack Overflow post.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It finally happened that Core Data was required for one of my Swift 2 projects, so naturally I turned to mogenerator to produce my human and machine NSManagedObject subclasses. However, I was unsatisfied with the results of the machine file\u2026particularly, the tendency of the template to clutter up the global namespace with enums for the … Continue reading “Better mogenerator Swift Templates”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7,8,6],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","tag-core-data","tag-mogenerator","tag-swift"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/6"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chibicode.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}