Alamofire Tutorial

Alamofire Tutorial. Open the Podfile in Textedit and add the line pod “Alamofire” “[version number]” or just simply pod “Alamofire” Save the file and in your terminal do a pod install once it has finished installation it should have created a Pods folder [projectname]xcworkspace and a Podfilelock .

In this Alamofire tutorial you’ll use Alamofire to perform basic networking tasks like uploading files and requesting data from a thirdparty RESTful API Alamofire’s elegance comes from the fact it was written from the ground up in Swift and does not inherit anything from its ObjectiveC counterpart AFNetworking 27/5 (26).

Alamofire Tutorial: Getting Started raywenderlich.com

In this section of the tutorial we will discuss the working and uses of the widely used networking library Alamofire We will set up a project and see how we can use Alamofire in it Setting up Alamofire in the iOS project Alamofire can be installed in the project using Cocoapods or Carthage.

Alamofire Tutorial with Swift (Quickstart)

Open the Podfile in Textedit and add the line pod “Alamofire” “[version number]” or just simply pod “Alamofire” Save the file and in your terminal do a pod install once it has finished installation it should have created a Pods folder [projectname]xcworkspace and a Podfilelock .

iOS Alamofire Library Javatpoint Tutorials List

Getting StartedUsing The Sw APIUnderstanding HTTP Rest and JsonWhy Use Alamofire?Requesting DataUsing A Codable Data ModelMethod ChainingFetching Multiple Asynchronous EndpointsSending Parameters with A RequestWhere to Go from Here?To kick things off use the Download Materialsbutton at the top or bottom of this article to download the begin project The app for this tutorial is StarWarsOpedia which provides quick access to data about Star Wars films as well as the starships used in those films Start by opening StarWarsOpediaxcworkspaceinside the begin project Build and run You’ll see this It’s a blank slate now but you’ll populate it with data soon! SW API is a free and open API that provides Star Wars data It’s only updated periodically but it’s a fun way to get to know Alamofire Access the API at swapidev There are multiple endpoints to access specific data but you’ll concentrate on https//swapidev/api/films and https//swapidev/api/starships For more information explore the Swapi documentation If you’re new to accessing thirdparty services over the internet this quick explanation will help HTTPis an application protocol used to transfer data from a server to a client such as a web browser or an iOS app HTTP defines several request methods that the client uses to indicate the desired action For example 1 GET Retrieves data such as a web page but doesn’t alter any data on the server 2 HEAD Identical to GET but only sends back the headers and not the actual data 3 POST Sends data to the server Use this for example when filling a form and clicking submit 4 PUT Sends data to the specific location provided Use this for example when updating a user’s profile 5 DELETE Deletes data from the specific location provided JSONstands for JavaScript Object Notation It provides a straightforward humanreadable and portable mechanism for transporting data between systems JSON has a limited number of data types to choose from string boolean array object You may be wondering why you should use Alamofire Apple already provides URLSessionand other classes for accessing content via HTTP so why add another dependency to your code base? The short answer is that while Alamofire is based on URLSession it obscures many of the difficulties of making networking calls freeing you to concentrate on your business logic You can access data on the internet with little effort and your code will be cleaner and easier to read There are several major functions available with Alamofire 1 AFupload Upload files with multipart stream file or data methods 2 AFdownload Download files or resume a download already in progress 3 AFrequest Other HTTP requests not associated with file transfers These Alamofire methods are global so you don’t have to instantiate a class to use them Underlying Alamofire elements include classes and structs like SessionManager DataRequest and DataResponse However you don’t need to fully understand the en Before you can start making your awesome app you need to do some setup Start by opening MainTableViewControllerswift Under import UIKit add the following This allows you to use Alamofire in this view controller At the bottom of the file add Here’s what’s happening with this code 1 Alamofire uses namespacing so you need to prefix all calls that you use with AF request(_methodparametersencodingheadersinterceptor)accepts the endpoint for your data It can accept more parameters but for now you’ll just send the URL as a string and use the default parameter values 2 Take the response given from the request as JSON For now you simply print the JSON data for debugging purposes Finally at the end of viewDidLoad() add This triggers the Alamofire request you just implemented Build and run At the top of the console you’ll see something like this In a few very simple lines you’ve fetched JSON data from a server Good job! But how do you work with the JSON data returned? Working with JSON directly can be messy due to its nested structure so to help with that you’ll create models to store your data In the Project navigator find the Networking group and create a new Swift file in that group named Filmswift Then add the following code to it With this code you’ve created the data properties and coding keys you need to pull data from the API’s film endpoint Note how the struct is Decodable which makes it possible to turn JSON into the data model The project defines a protocol — Displayable — to simplify showing detailed information later in the tutorial You must make Film conform to it Add the following at the end of Filmswift This extension allows the detailed information display’s view controller to get the correct labels and values for a film from the model itself In the Networking group create a new Swift file named Filmsswift Add the following code to the file This struct denotes Alamofire uses method chaining which works by connecting the response of one method as the input of another This not only keeps the code compact but it also makes your code clearer Give it a try now by replacing all of the code in fetchFilms()with This single line not only does exactly what took multiple lines to do before but you also added validation From top to bottom you request the endpoint validate the response by ensuring the response returned an HTTP status code in the range 200–299 and decode the response into your data model Nice! ] Up to this point you’ve only requested films endpoint data which returns an array of film data in a single request If you look at Film you’ll see starships which is of type [String] This property does not contain all of the starship data but rather an array of endpoints to the starship data This is a common pattern programmers use to provide access to data without providing more data than necessary For example imagine that you never tap “The Phantom Menace” because you know Jar Jar It’s a waste of resources and bandwidth for the server to send all of the starship data for “The Phantom Menace” because you may not use it Instead the server sends you a list of endpoints for each starship so that if you want the starship data you can fetch it For the search to work you need a list of the starships that match the search criteria To accomplish this you need to send the search criteria to the endpoint for getting starships Earlier you used the films’ endpoint https//swapidev/api/films to get the list of films You can also get a list of all starships with the https//swapidev/api/starshipsendpoint Take a look at the endpoint and you’ll see a response similar to the film’s response The only difference is that this time the results data is a list of all starships Alamofire’s requestcan accept more than just the URL string that you’ve sent so far It can also accept an array of key/value pairs as parameters The swapidev API allows you to send parameters to the starships endpoint to perform a search To do this you use a key of searchwith the search criteria as the value But before you dive into that you need to set up a new model called Starshipsso that you can decode the response just like you do with the You can download the completed project using the Download Materialsbutton at the top or bottom of this article While building your app you’ve learned a lot about Alamofire’s basics You learned that Alamofire can make networking calls with very little setup and how to make basic calls using the request function by sending just the URL string Also you learned to make more complex calls to do things like searching by sending parameters You learned how to use request chaining and request validation how to convert the response into JSON and how to convert the response data into a custom data model This article covered the very basics You can take a deeper dive by looking at the documentation on the Alamofire site at https//githubcom/Alamofire/Alamofire I highly suggest learning more about Apple’s URLSession which Alamofire uses under the hood 1 Ray Wenderlich – URLSession Tutorial Getting Started 2 Apple URL Session Programming Guide I hope you enjoyed this tutorial Ple 46/5 (48).