A Swift NSPredicate
DSL for iOS & OS X inspired bySnapKit, lovingly written in Swift, and created by that weird dude at KrakenDev .
If you're familiar with the intuitive feel of theSnapKit API, then you'll feel right at home with PrediKit!
Documentation is generated byJazzy and can be found here for your convenience !
Because I wanted to! Also, because NSPredicate
creation is hard. When working with CoreData
you use NSPredicates
to fetch persisted objects. CoreData
is hard enough, so why have the additional complexity of using a complex string-based predicate system?
The language you need to use to create predicate formats are completely string-based which can lead to a host of issues:
SQL
-like language that comes with the creation of predicate formats. In fact, an entire cheatsheet by the awesome guys at Realm was created because of this! NSPredicate
system, then nothing happens. It just fails silently. At least, I think it does. I'm currently writing this on 2 hours of sleep. Don't quote me on that. Well, hopefully it fixes all of the above and more. Currently, it:
matches
or doesNot.match
another value. builder
closures do not need capture semantics as each closure is a @noescape
closure. Read here if you don't know what that means . PrediKit can be included in your project through any of these methods:
CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Cocoa projects. You can install it with the following command:
$ gem install cocoapods
CocoaPods 0.39.0+ is required to build PrediKit
To integrate PrediKit through CocoaPods, make sure the use_frameworks!
line is included in your Podfile (PrediKit is written in Swift so it needs to be brought in as a framework). Make sure these lines are somewhere in your Podfile
:
use_frameworks! pod 'PrediKit'
Then, run the following command:
$ pod install
Afterwards, whenever you need PrediKit, add this line to the top of the file it's being used in:
import PrediKit
Carthage is a decentralized dependency manager that builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks.
You can install Carthage with Homebrew using the following command:
$ brew update $ brew install carthage
To integrate PrediKit into your Xcode project using Carthage, specify it in your Cartfile
:
github "KrakenDev/PrediKit"
Run carthage update
to build the framework and drag the built PrediKit.framework
into your Xcode project.
Afterwards, whenever you need PrediKit, add this line to the top of the file it's being used in:
import PrediKit
If you prefer not to use either of the aforementioned dependency managers, you can integrate PrediKit into your project manually. I specifically kept all of the code for PrediKit in one file in order to support you peeps who like to integrate manually.
First, click on the Sources folder link, right click on PrediKit.swift
and click Save Link As
. Save the file wherever you'd like and drag the downloaded file into your project. That's it! One and done, folks!
PrediKit tries to make NSPredicate
creation easy. Heavily inspired bySnapKit's API, the API for PrediKit is extremely similar for people who love it as much as I do. Check it out. This example creates a predicate used to fetch a ManagedObject
from CoreData
:
let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string("title").equals("The Almighty Kraken") }
To check if a property is nil:
let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string("title").equalsNil }
PrediKit also overloads the &&
, ||
, and !
operators. This allows you compound and specify whether or not
to include your includers
(Crappy name, I know. Feel free to give me suggestions).
let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in //Include any ManagedLegend instance if the property named "string" is NOT nil and does NOT equal "The Almighty Kraken" !includeIf.string("title").equalsNil && !includeIf.string("title").equals("The Almighty Kraken") && //Also include any ManagedLegend instance if the date property named "birthdate" is in the past or if the bool property "isAwesome" is true. includeIf.date("birthdate").isEarlierThan(NSDate()) || includeIf.bool("isAwesome").isTrue }
You can even create includers
conditionally!
let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in let isKrakenQuery = includeIf.string("title").equals("The Almighty Kraken") let birthdateQuery = includeIf.date("birthdate").isEarlierThan(NSDate()) let isAwesomeQuery = includeIf.bool("isAwesome").isTrue if shouldCheckBirthdate { (isKrakenQuery && birthdateQuery) || isAwesomeQuery } else { isKrakenQuery || isAwesomeQuery } }
I don't know about y'all, but the SQL
-like IN
operator was hard to wrap my head around. PrediKit makes this a little more human-readable:
let awesomePeeps = ["Kraken", "Cthulhu", "Voldemort", "Ember", "Umber", "Voldemort"] let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string("title").matchesAnyValueIn(awesomePeeps) }
PrediKit also has built-in support for subquery predicates:
let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string("title").equals("The Almighty Kraken") && //Only include Krakens that have more than three hungry cerberus friends includeIf.collection("cerberusFriends").subquery(ManagedCerberus.self) { $0.bool("isHungry").isTrue return .IncludeIfMatched(.Amount(.IsGreaterThan(3))) } }
Personally, I love using a variation of the Selector Extension Pattern when using PrediKit. It allows you to avoid misspelling your property names when using the API. By creating a Selector extension like so:
import Foundation extension Selector { private enum Names: String { case title case birthdate case age case friends case isAwesome case isHungry } private init(_ name: Names) { self.init(name.rawValue) } static let title = Selector(.title) static let birthdate = Selector(.birthdate) static let age = Selector(.age) static let friends = Selector(.friends) static let isAwesome = Selector(.isAwesome) static let isHungry = Selector(.isHungry) }
PrediKit becomes a lot more expressive now:
//BEFORE let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string("title").equals("The Almighty Kraken") } //AFTER let predicate = NSPredicate(ManagedLegend.self) { includeIf in includeIf.string(.title).equals("The Almighty Kraken") }
PrediKit is licensed under the MIT
license. Check out the LICENSE
file to learn more.