/ActionKit

Easy, closure-based Swift methods for working with interactive UIKit elements.

Primary LanguageSwiftMIT LicenseMIT

ActionKit

ActionKit is a experimental, light-weight, easy to use framework that wraps the target-action design paradigm into a less verbose, cleaner format. It shortens target-action method calls by removing the target and replacing the selector with a closure.

Licensed under the terms of the MIT license

Target-action example without ActionKit (prior to Swift 2.2)

button.addTarget(self, action: Selector("buttonWasTapped:"), forControlEvents: .TouchUpInside)
func buttonWasTapped(sender: UIButton!) {

    self.button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)
    
}

Target-action example without ActionKit with Swift 2.2

button.addTarget(self, action: #selector(ViewController.buttonWasTapped(_:)), forControlEvents: .TouchUpInside)
func buttonWasTapped(sender: UIButton!) {

    self.button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)
    
}

Target-action example with ActionKit

button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) {
  
  self.button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)

}

Target-action example with ActionKit with closure parameter

button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) { (button: UIButton) in
  
  button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)

}

Methods

UIControl

Adding an action closure for a control event

- addControlEvent(controlEvents: UIControlEvents, closure: () -> ())

- addControlEvent(controlEvents: UIControlEvents, closureWithControl: (UIControl) -> ())
Examples
button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) {
  
  self.button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)

}
button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) { (button: UIButton) in
  
    button.setTitle("Button was tapped!", forState: .Normal)

}

Removing an action closure for a control event

- removeControlEvent(controlEvents: UIControlEvents)
Example
button.removeControlEvent(.TouchUpInside)

UIGestureRecognizer

Initializing a gesture recognizer with an action closure

- init(closure: () -> ())

- init(closureWithGesture: (UIGestureRecognizer) -> ())
Examples
var singleTapGestureRecognizer = UITapGestureRecognizer() {
  
  self.view.backgroundColor = UIColor.redColor()

}
var singleTapGestureRecognizer = UITapGestureRecognizer() { (gesture: UITapGestureRecognizer) in
  
  if gesture.state == .Began {
      let locInView = gesture.locationInView(self.view)
      ...
  }

}

Adding an action closure to a gesture recognizer

- addClosure(name: String, closure: () -> ())

- addClosure(name: String, closureWithGesture: (UIGestureRecognizer) -> ())
Example
singleTapGestureRecognizer.addClosure("makeBlue") {
  
  self.view.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()

}

Removing an action closure for a control event

- removeActionClosure()
Example
singleTapGestureRecognizer.removeActionClosure()

How it works

ActionKit extends target-action functionality by providing easy to use methods that take closures instead of a selector. ActionKit uses a singleton which stores the closures and acts as the target. Closures capture and store references to any constants and variables from their context, so the user is free to use variables from the context in which the closure was defined in.

Migration from previous versions

Version 1.1.0

Version 1.1.0 adds an optional UIControl or UIGestureRecognizer to the closure. This might lead to possible backwards-incompatibility.

We made sure you can still call the closures without any parameters, like the following:

button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) {
    print("the button was tapped")
}

However, with previous versions of ActionKit, due to the peculiarity of Swift, it was also possible to call the closure with an unused parameter:

button.addControlEvent(.TouchUpInside) { _ in
    print("the button was tapped")
}

In this example the _ refers to the empty input tuple ().

Now, with these extra closure parameters, the above is no longer valid, as it is ambiguous which method is being called: addControlEvent without closure parameters or with a UIControl as closure parameter. When you have this Xcode will report: Ambiguous use of 'addControlEvent'.

If you're using _ in in your code and you get this ambiguous error, migrate by either removing the _ in all together or by replacing it with (control: UIControl) in. (For gesture recognizers use (gesture: UIGestureRecognizer) in.)

Supported

  • Adding and removing an action to concrete gesture-recognizer objects, eg. UITapGestureRecognizer, UISwipeGestureRecognizer
  • Adding and removing an action for UIControl objects, eg. UIButton, UIView

In the pipeline

  • Adding and removing multiple actions for a single UIGestureRecognizer
  • Adding and removing multiple actions for a single UIControl
  • Better manage stored closures

Installation

CocoaPods

ActionKit is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:

pod 'ActionKit', '~> 1.1.0'

Carthage

    1. Add the following to your Cartfile:
    github "ActionKit/ActionKit" == 1.1.0