Building a SwiftUI Weather App with Lasso, Part 1: Setup

As SwiftUI matures and becomes increasingly considered for production implementation, it’s important to add interoperability support in UIKit iOS applications. As a result, WW has added SwiftUI support when using its open-source architectural framework, Lasso.

This is WW Tech’s first tutorial to demonstrate the use of Lasso with SwiftUI. For demonstrative purposes, I will outline the steps to build a small weather app using Lasso and SwiftUI.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lasso, be sure to check out these WW Tech articles that introduce Lasso concepts and the corresponding documentation.

• Lasso: Introducing a new architectural framework for iOS
• Lasso: An introduction to Flows
• Lasso documentation

This article assumes some knowledge of SwiftUI. As a result, this article excludes parts of the code and does not explain SwiftUI concepts; instead, this focuses on Lasso concepts and changes.

Using Lasso and SwiftUI Together

Before we get started, let’s take a moment to understand how Lasso and SwiftUI fit together.

When choosing an app architecture, it’s important to make considerations about scalability, maintainability, and overall structure. The Lasso architectural pattern provides many benefits when incorporating SwiftUI into predominantly UIKit apps. Here are some of the continued benefits that the Lasso framework provides when using SwiftUI:

• SwiftUI can be used for the View portion of a Lasso Screen.
• The SwiftUI View is wrapped by a UIHostingViewController.
• Screen is still a unidirectional data flow paradigm.
• All logic is still in the Store.
• View still dispatches actions to the Store.
• View still observes the State and updates the View accordingly.
• Flow still handles all Screen interoperation.

What we’ll build

Home, Detail, and Map Screens

This project’s source code can be found here. As we go through this tutorial, be sure to follow along with the original project source code to add the necessary code blocks and files.

Creating the project

Start by creating a new iOS application, similar to any other iOS application, by opening Xcode.

1. Choose Create a new Xcode Project, then iOS, then App.
2. Select SwiftUI as the interface and UIKit App Delegate as the project’s life cycle.
3. As an optional step, you can select Include Tests.

It’s important to select a UIKit App Delegate for the project life cycle. At this time, Lasso still uses UIKit components, such as a UINavigationController, to handle navigation.

Adding Lasso

To add Lasso to an iOS project, you can use Swift Package Manager or Cocoapods. For this project, we’ll use the former. Follow these steps to add Lasso as a dependency:

1. Choose File, then Swift Packages, then Add Package Dependency.
2. Use the following Git URL: https://github.com/ww-tech/lasso.git.
3. Select the feature/swiftui branch to update the Swift Package.
4. Add Lasso to your project’s main target.
5. As an optional step, add LassoTestUtilities to your project’s unit testing target.

Currently, the SwiftUI updates to Lasso are on the branch named feature/swiftui. Soon, develop will merge in this feature branch.

OpenWeather API setup

For this project, we’ll be using a RESTful API by OpenWeather® to get weather data. This API helps demonstrate networking in a SwiftUI and Lasso app. To use this third-party service, you’ll need to create a free account and a free API key. For help using OpenWeather, be sure to check out their FAQs page.

After you set up an API key with OpenWeather, make sure to replace YOUR_API_KEY_HERE in the file named WeatherService.swift included in the project source code.

Disclaimer: In this example, we will be hard coding an API key into the application’s source code. This is not something that is recommended for production systems and is being done only for simplicity within this example. In a production scenario, this call would be proxied through your own API/microservice in order to protect the API key from being visible to anyone using the client-side application.

Creating the data model

Like any other iOS project, you’ll need to create a data model to represent the raw data returned by the API. By reviewing the API documentation, you’ll see sample JSON responses that represent the data model shape.

The key takeaway here is that the data model must conform to Equatable. Lasso requires that all State properties conform to Equatable.

Note: State is defined in Lasso and is not the @State property wrapper in SwiftUI.

Weather.swift

Creating the API service

Next, we’ll implement the API service calls. For this, we’ll use Apple’s Combine framework to leverage AnyPublisher. This will allow us to easily fetch weather data when a user selects a previous search from a list of recent searches or enters a new zip code.

WeatherService.swift

Creating the Lasso ScreenModules

We’ll create two ScreenModules for this project, one for the Home screen and one for the Detail screen (see “What we’ll build,” above). Each ScreenModule will hold the State, Actions, and Outputs of our sample application. To learn more about Lasso ScreenModules, be sure to check out this guide.

As an example, here’s what the Home ScreenModule should look like.

HomeScreen.swift

You’ll notice that the process of declaring a ScreenModule when using SwiftUI is nearly the same as when using UIKit. We can still override the State, Action, and Output of a ScreenModule, and we still need to define a defaultInitialState. One slight difference is how we define createScreen. Instead of passing a ViewStore into a ViewController, we’re passing it into the constructor of a SwiftUI View. After that, we pass the SwiftUI View into the Screen constructor. For convenience, Lasso will later wrap it as a UIHostingController to eliminate this repetitive step.

The definition of the Detail ScreenModule follows a very similar structure and process as Home. The only difference is that State, Action, and Output remove logic specific to Home and add logic specific to Detail.

Creating the LassoStores

Next, we’ll create a LassoStore that will handle the business logic associated with the Actions of each respective ScreenModule. Following the previous section, let’s take a look at Home’s LassoStore.

HomeScreenStore.swift

Later in this tutorial, we’ll connect our SwiftUI Views to this LassoStore. When using SwiftUI components, such as Button or TextField, the logic in handleAction will execute for the specified action and interaction. For example, we’ll set the onCommit property of the Home search bar (a SwiftUI TextField) to execute the didEditZipCode(String) action.

As a general note, we’re passing a WeatherService object into the HomeScreenStore constructor. For better testability, we can later change this to a protocol, such as WeatherFetchable, to easily unit test this LassoStore.

Creating the Lasso Flow

We’ll now give a navigation structure to our app using a Flow.

Navigation Flow Structure

Looking at the diagram, you’ll see three main screens: Home, Detail, and Map. You’ll also note that Home is the entry point of the app. From the screenshots at the top, you might also notice that the app leverages a navigation stack to push views onto the view hierarchy.

We’ll first start by defining a basic Flow. Note that NoOutputNavigationFlow is a basic FlowModule that specifies no Output and requires placement in a UINavigationController.

WeatherFlow.swift

Next, we’ll override the createInitialController method of our Flow.

WeatherFlow.swift

Recalling from a previous step, HomeScreen defines its createScreen method with a SwiftUI View. What you’ll notice, though, is the implementation of a Flow remains virtually the same when using SwiftUI instead of UIKit. The controller property intelligently wraps our SwiftUI View in a UIHostingController allowing for easy interoperability with an existing Flow, while adhering to the required UIViewController return type.

One important note is that the Map section of this app does not have a ScreenModule or a LassoStore. Instead, it uses UIViewRepresentable to wrap an MKMapView with the coordinates of our search location. As a result, the implementation of our Flow when navigating to the map changes.

WeatherFlow.swift

Here, we’ll have to handle more of the implementation details. First, we’ll instantiate a MapView in our createMapController method. Additionally, we’ll add the .edgesIgnoringSafeArea(.all) view modifier to fill the available space. Unlike the process earlier, we’ll have to manually wrap this View with a UIHostingController and set it as the root view. We do this to keep the UIKit navigation pattern, allowing our Flow to handle the logic associated with pushing and popping this screen onto and off the navigation stack as a UIViewController.

Recap

Up to this point, much of Lasso has remained the same for our SwiftUI app. We still have the main components of Lasso: Flow, FlowModule, ScreenModule, and LassoStore.

However, some differences have already been introduced. We’re now using UIHostingController to wrap our SwiftUI Views as UIViewControllers.

You’ll also notice that we’re not using many common property wrappers, such as @Published. That’s because we’ll leverage the power of Lasso to handle all state management logic.

In Part 2 of this tutorial, we’ll learn how to finally add this into our SwiftUI project and implement the SwiftUI Views.

As a reminder, this project’s source code can be found here.

Metadata

Author: Charles Pisciotta, iOS Engineering Intern
Created: October 2021

Notes

Are you interested in joining the WW team? Check out the careers page to view technology job listings as well as open positions on other teams.

OpenWeather provides the weather data in this app. WW is not affiliated with or sponsored by OpenWeather, nor is WW a sponsor of OpenWeather. OpenWeather is used exclusively for demonstrative purposes.