#TableViewReactiveAdapter

Small drop-in component which allows UITableView to be manipulated in reactive manner through receiving ReactiveCocoa signals.

Idea

While trying to adopt new reactive programming paradigm and ReactiveCocoa framework in particular in one of my projects, I found it extremely difficult to eliminate all those states bound to UITableView and it's datasource. I came up with pretty complicated signals scheme to only insert and delete spinning indicator at the bottom of the table when network request is kicked off and when it's completed. Futhermore, pretty the same boilerplate is needed to perform any other UITableView manipulation. So I decided to make a general solution suitable for all reactive-powered use cases. This question in ReactiveCocoa repo also made me think more about it.

Installing

You can integrate TableViewReactiveAdapter through cocoapods:

pod 'TableViewReactiveAdapter', :git=> 'https://github.com/gavrix/TableViewReactiveAdapter.git'

TableViewReactiveAdapter has ReactiveCocoa and libextobjc as dependencies, so these pods will be setup automatically.

Usage

TableViewReactiveAdapter takes a UITableView it manages and act as a datasource for it. It exposes subscriber property which you can susbcribe to a ReactiveCocoa's signal. This subscriber is designed to receive objects of class SRGTableViewModificationEvent and it simply filters out any other objects. The simplest items insert to the top of a tableView in response to an event could look like this:

[[eventSignal map:^SRGTableViewModificationEvent *(NetworkResponse *response) {
    return [SRGTableViewModificationEvent insertRowsEvent:response.items atLocation:[NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:0 inSection:0]];
}] subscribe: self.tableViewReactiveAdapter.subscriber];

TableView flush

Any insertions or deletions are performed immediately to a backing data structure, however, tableView itself is affected in different way: first event is flushed to a tableView immediately, subseqent events, while tableView animations are in place, are buffered and flushed only when tableView finishes it's first animation. That way, no matter how often or rare events are sent to tableView, it's updating animations will be serial and won't interfere with each other.

Credits

TableViewReactiveAdapter was created by Sergey @octogavrix Gavrilyuk.

License

TableViewReactiveAdapter is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.