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I am trying to keep to the Apple MVC design pattern where the view receives input and passes it on to the controller. To keep the controller thin and to avoid it turning into a bloated GodClass doing all the work, I am attempting to create a subclass of UIView and to receive user input there to be passed to the controller for processing. But I am running into problems with how to best do this in Swift.

In order to pass the user input from the view to the controller my UIView subclass will need to communicate with the associated ViewController, but I've seen posts on SO about how that is not recommended. This Q&A, for example, advises that this is bad but suggests a delegate approach. A comment from the same Q&A also notes that this is bad.

Apple's own MVC example doesn't demonstrate a separate UIView subclass, but uses the existing UITableView, which is all coded within the parent UIViewController, making it a bloated, rather than a thin controller.

How to best approach this?

Community
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hitlad
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I recommend you read the apple's doc on MVC pattern since I noticed you do not really understand the principle of the pattern: Model-View-Controller

In order to build lighter ViewController, look at this issue: Lighter View Controllers

You may also interested in MVVM (which used in Cocoa&CocoaTouch for VC thinning)
have a look at this article: Introduction to MVVM

duan
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Your experience with bloated View Controllers is not necessarily the fault of your misunderstanding the MVC pattern. The iOS developer Ilya Punchka writes about this in his tutorial post about View Controller Thinning and writes:

A lot have been said on this topic already, even more will be said in future cause unfortunately there is no silver bullet and view controller still stay massive in many projects. Recently Andy Matuschak presented Let's Play: Refactor the Mega Controller! a live coding session on this topic. So you can see it's a well know and still actual problem.

The situation isn't helped by Apple's sample code which also demonstrates massive view controller syndrome! Check out the above links (although the first is in Swift 2.0 and I've had troubles updating his dependancies to Swift 3.0), they both give useful oversight on some ideas around this subject.

Peter J. Nicholls
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  • Actually the further I get in learning how to code for iOS and Swift, the more I despair at the amount there is revealed to learn as you pass over each new horizon....! – Peter J. Nicholls Oct 24 '16 at 03:30
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I'd recommend taking a look at LetsBuildThatApp episode "Swift: Firebase 3 - How to Refactor View code out of Controller (Ep 23)" here:

https://youtu.be/F3snOdQ5Qyo

Shows a pretty good way to refactor the View code out of the Controller.

Arin Davoodian
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