Reactive Way to Handle Dismissing Modal View Controller
date
Nov 18, 2016
slug
reactive-dismiss-vc
status
Published
tags
Tech
summary
type
Post
We use modal presentation quite often in iOS. You must be familiar with:
self.present(vc, animated: true, completion: nil)
Now lets say we want something to happen with our current VC when the modal VC is dismissed, there are several ways to do that.
The Cocoa way would be to use presenting view controller, delegate pattern or notification center.
Lets go through each briefly.
Presenting view controller
This option is the worst because the child/presented VC needs to know quite a lot of detail about the parent/presenting VC. That should almost never be the case. The child should know as little about the parent as possible. Therefore lets avoid this:
class ModalVC: UIViewController {
func someFunc() {
dismiss(animated: true, completion: {
if let parent = self.presentingViewController {
parent.doSomething()
}
})
}
}
The next pattern is a direct improvement over
presentingViewController.Delegate pattern
Create a protocol with a void method and get the parent VC to conform to it.
protocol ModalHandler {
func modalDismissed()
}
class ParentVC: UIViewController, ModalHandler {
func modalDismissed() {
// do something
}
}
Then set the ParentVC as delegate of ModalVC before presentation and call the method during dismissal.
class ModalVC: UIViewController {
func someFunc() {
dismiss(animated: true, completion: {
delegate.modalDismissed()
})
}
}
This way is better that using
presentingViewController because the child doesn’t know about the parent, but only the protocol/interface as a layer of abstraction. I recommend using this pattern in a non reactive projects.Notification pattern
With this, we need to get ParentVC to observe the modal dismissed notification.
class ParentVC: UIViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {
NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self, selector: #selector(ParentVC.handleModalDismissed), name: NSNotification.Name(rawValue: "modalIsDimissed"), object: nil)
}
func handleModalDismissed() {
// Do something
}
}
class ModalVC: UIViewController {
func someFunc() {
dismiss(animated: true, completion: {
NotificationCenter.default.post(name: NSNotification.Name(rawValue: "modalIsDimissed"), object: nil)
})
}
}
I don’t like notifications because both parent and modal VC needs to know the notification name to work.
Reactive pattern
When you use ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveSwift, you could easily handle modal dismissal with several lines of codes in the presenting VC. This is my preferred way because the child doesn’t even need to do any extra work. All the heavy lifting is done by
ReactiveCocoa.class ParentVC: UIViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {
let modalVC = ModalVC()
modalVC.reactive
.trigger(for: #selector(onboardNav.viewDidDisappear(_:)))
.observe { _ in self.handleModalDismissed() }
present(modalVC, animated: false, completion: nil)
}
func handleModalDismissed() { }
}
In here, the ParentVC will observe modalVC before presenting. When modalVC calls
viewDidDisappear(_:), ParentVC will call self.handleModalDismissed().As you can see, it is very clean and quite easy to understand even if you aren’t as familiar with reactive concepts.