Swift snippet #11 — RawRepresentable

Monday, 20th March, 2017

You can find its Gist here!

The above snippet creates items & itemsCount properties on every enum which has RawValue as Int.

enum City: Int {
 
 case delhi
 case bangalore
 case mumbai
}

With the help of above snippet, to get the entire the list of cases we can do City.items or City.itemsCount to get the count 🚀

Since the advent of Swift, we all have been using Enums a lot lately in our apps! And why not, they are super cool and so powerful. But they have this big limitation where we explicitly need to provide a computed var to list all the items or even items count, something like:

extension City {
  
  static var items: [City] {
    return [.delhi, .bangalore, .mumbai]
  }
  static var itemsCount: int {
    return items.count
  }
}

Nothing is wrong with the above code but its not awesome 😓 Everytime we add a new case, we have to update our items, failing of which could lead to bugs 🐛 No one likes them so how about we automate it to make it work out of the box & thus the above snippet 😄

Big thanks to Nate Cook for making it even more awesome!!!

It has two limitations though 🛠️:

1. only applicable for enums having RawValue as Int
2. not applicable for discontinuous cases nor the ones starting from a value other than 0

If you are wondering about the inception of Swift-Snippets or want to checkout more such snippets, you can find them here 😊