quick and easy creation of thunder collection views in iOS using a declarative approach.

CollectionView

October 12, 2023

Thunder Collection is a useful framework which enables quick and easy creation of collection views in iOS using a declarative approach. It makes the process of creating complex collection views as simple as a few lines of code; and removes the necessity for having long chains of index paths and if statements.

How It Works

Thunder Collection comprises of two main types of objects:

Items

Collection items are objects that conform to the CollectionItemDisplayable protocol, this protocol has properties such as: cellClass, selectionHandler which are responsible for defining how the cell is configured. As this is a protocol any object can conform to it, which allows you to simply send an array of model objects to the collection view to display your content.

Sections

Collection sections are objects that conform to the CollectionSectionDisplayable protocol, most of the time you won’t need to implement this protocol yourself as Thunder Collection has a convenience class CollectionSection which can be used in most circumstances. However you can implement more complex layouts using this protocol on your own classes.

Installation

Setting up your app to use ThunderCollection is a simple and quick process. You can choose between a manual installation, or use Carthage.

Carthage

Add github "3sidedcube/ThunderCollection" == 2.0.0 to your Cartfile.
Run carthage update --platform ios --use-xcframeworks to fetch the framework.
Drag ThunderCollection into your project’s Frameworks and Libraries section from the Carthage/Build folder (Embed).
Add the Build Phases script step as defined here.

Manual

Clone as a submodule, or download this repo
Import ThunderCollection.xcproject into your project
Add ThunderCollection.framework to your Embedded Binaries.
Wherever you want to use ThunderCollection use import ThunderCollection.

Code Example

A Simple Collection View Controller

Setting up a collection view is massively simplified using thunder collection, in fact, we can get a simple collection view running with just a few lines of code. To create a custom collection view we subclass from CollectionViewController. We then set up our collection view in the viewDidLoad: method. In contrast to ThunderCollection no default implementations of CollectionItemDisplayable are provided, as there is no standard implementation of UICollectionViewCell like there is with UITableViewCell.


                                              
                                                import ThunderCollection
class MyCollectionViewController: CollectionViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {

super.viewDidLoad()
// ImageRow not provided by framework!

let imageRow = ImageRow(image: someImage)
let section = CollectionSection(rows: [imageRow])

data = [section]

}

}

GitHub

View Github

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