I use Google Analytics to collect usage statistics across both my web and mobile applications.  There are a few great AngularJS and other libraries that track page usage automatically when a controller is initialized.  Using these concepts I wanted to create my own similar approach in Swift.  The end result of this is the creation of a simple BaseController which makes an analytics call when viewDidLoad is called.

class BaseController: UIViewController {

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        Analytics().screenView(self.controllerName)
    }

}

Deconstructing this simple one line method call you will notice there are an extension method called controllerName passed into a static method on the analytics struct.  The controllerName references the below extension method and simply is used to get the name of the UIViewController so that we can track usage by the screen name.  Below is a snippet with the code for this extension method.

extension UIViewController {

    var controllerName: String {
        return NSStringFromClass(self.classForCoder).componentsSeparatedByString(".").last!
    }

}

The analytics struct is an anti corruption layer that I’ve added to my app to wrap the underlying Google Analytics code.  This also provides a layer of abstraction which helps combat the fact that Xcode randomly makes the Google Analytics Objective-C references invalid.  The Analytics struct is used in two places in my app. First it is initialized in my app delegate, then it is used within my BaseController to record feature usage.

Before we get to the Analytics struct code below is the snippet using in my app delegate used to create a default tracker with our Google Analytics key.

Analytics.createTracker(Analytics.GAToken.QAKey.rawValue)

Once initialized the Analytics struct method screenView is used on each viewDidLoad call to record that a UIViewController has been viewed.

import Google

public struct Analytics {

    enum GAToken: String {
        case QAKey = "UPDATE-WITH-QA-KEY"
        case ProdKey = "UPDATE-WITH-PROD-KEY"
    }

    public static func createTracker(key: String) {
        GAI.sharedInstance().trackerWithTrackingId(key)
        GAI.sharedInstance().logger.logLevel = GAILogLevel.None
        GAI.sharedInstance().trackUncaughtExceptions = true
    }

    private func getTracker() -> GAITracker {
        return GAI.sharedInstance().defaultTracker
    }

    public func screenView(name: String) {
        let tracker = getTracker()
        tracker.set(kGAIScreenName, value: name)
        let builder = GAIDictionaryBuilder.createScreenView()
        tracker.send(builder.build() as [NSObject : AnyObject])
    }
}

Although there are more comprehensive Analytics (Google or other) approaches I’ve found this straightforward approach provides the basics in away that works for me.

Helpful Links:

• gist with source code available here
• Google Analytics on CocoaPods here
• Google Analytics for iOS resources

For my current project we’ve got a design requirement that all screens have a simple “Back” button instead of the default text that iOS provides when pushing a new controller.

I found that Swift’s inheritance model combined with extensions methods make this simple to implement in a re-usable fashion.  To start this approach, I implemented a based controller which I called  BaseController that manages the title of the backBarButtonItem.  This is automatically handled by just inheriting from the BaseController.  In the below example we create a new NotificationController using this pattern.

import UIKit

class NotificationController: BaseViewController {

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
    }

}

The BaseController only has two lines of code.  The first creates a string with the title of the back button. The second calls an extension method that manages the back button title information.

import UIKit

class BaseViewController: UIViewController {

    override func viewDidLoad() {

        super.viewDidLoad()

        let backTitle = NSLocalizedString("Back", comment: "Back button label")
        self.addBackbutton(backTitle)

    }

}

The heavy lifting is performed in the UIViewController extension.  Using the addBackbutton method to add a new UIBarButtonItem or update the current one’s title.  If a new UIBarButtonItem is added the backButtonAction method is added to dismiss the controller on press.

import UIKit

extension UIViewController {

    func backButtonAction() {
        self.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true, completion: nil)
    }

    func addBackbutton(title: String) {
        if let nav = self.navigationController,
            let item = nav.navigationBar.topItem {
            item.backBarButtonItem  = UIBarButtonItem(title: title, style: UIBarButtonItemStyle.Plain, target: self, action:
                #selector(self.backButtonAction))
        } else {
            if let nav = self.navigationController,
                let _ = nav.navigationBar.backItem {
                self.navigationController!.navigationBar.backItem!.title = title
            }
        }
    }
}

The full code is available as a gist here.

As part of a recent project I’ve been spending more time then I’d like with time zones.  In my case a variety of dates and time zone details are provided by a remote service. Having spent the last few years solving this type of problem with moment.js I was excited to see that NSTimeZone contained many of the same features.

The time zone information is provided in the IANA time zone database format.  I was really existed to see that you can create a new NSTimeZone using an IANA time zone name.  Below is an example using the Kuala Lumpur time zone.

let timeZone = NSTimeZone(name: "Asia/Kuala_Lumpur")
//What is the abbreviation
timeZone?.abbreviation
//Get the description with everything
timeZone?.description

So my first experiment was to parse the IANA time zones into a Swift String Array so that I could write a few Playground tests.  For this blog post we will show a few of the time zone names, instead of the full 417 item array.

let IANAtimeZones = ["Europe/Andorra","Asia/Dubai","Asia/Kabul",...]

* You can see the full array here

Next I found that the NSTimeZone method knownTimeZoneNames provides a list of all time zones iOS supports out of the box.  This gives me an easy way for me to later compare the IANA time zone database with those supported by iOS.  I use the below to get a list of those time zones known by iOS.

let iOStimeZones = NSTimeZone.knownTimeZoneNames()

To make writing any comparison testing alittle easier we create a method called tzExists.  This will allow us to compare a provided time zone name against all of those known by iOS.  In your production code you will want to cache the knownTimeZoneNames array for performance reasons.

func tzExists(name : String) -> Bool {
    return NSTimeZone.knownTimeZoneNames().contains(name)
}

Now that we have everything setup a simple loop can be used to compare our IANA time zones with those known to iOS.

for tz in IANAtimeZones {
    if(!tzExists(tz)) {
        print(tz + " not available")
    }
}

Oddly enough there are differences.  It could be I have an incomplete version of the IANA time zone database as iOS has 10 more known time zones then my IANA test harness.  Even with these differences the straight forward usage of NSTimeZone solves my problem perfectly.

Additional Resources:

• Playground : A playground which shows the above objects, tests, and methods is available here.
• Gist : The playground is available as a gist here.