Fictive Kin Project

This is the project for the interview with Fictive Kin. It fetches posts from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts and displays them in a UICollectionView where the cells size themselves according to their content using AutoLayout.

Installation

This was compiled using Xcode 11.4.1 and CocoaPods 1.9.3, if the project doesn't compile please delete the Pods folder and the Podfile.lock from the proyect and run pod install

Documentation

Main Components

• Webservice as a Service that has the logic to fetch the data from the server
• Post as the Model, it complies to Codable so the JSON can be easily parsed
• TitlesViewController and PostViewController as the UIViewControllers, more info below
• PostCell as the UICollectionViewCell
• LoadingView as a UIView to display the loading state, more info below

TitlesViewController:

TitlesViewController handles the UICollectionView layout logic and it makes the call to WebService to fetch the posts. WebService gets injected into TitlesViewController by Property Injection on SceneDelegate.swift:22

PostViewController:

PostViewController simply displays the Title and the Body for each Post when a PostCell is tapped on TitlesViewController

LoadingView:

The idea of LoadingView is to resemble a clock (in a very basic way) to show the user that we're loading the data. Since we can get the JSON really fast I placed a delay before making the call to the server so the animation can be seen (TitlesViewController.swift:35)

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Error Handling

If there's an error when fetching the data from the server (e.g. no internet connection) an alert appears indicating such error with a Retry button which fires the request again. This can be tested by initializing the app without internet connection and connecting again before tapping on Retry

Testing

I decided to add Unit Tests just for the data handling, there's a class called WebServiceTests and a local JSON file with mock data (DataMock.json). The idea is to use the getPosts() function from WebService with the local JSON file's URL to check if the parsing works as expected

Launch Screen

I decided to use a Gradient for the background of the TitlesViewController which is generated at runtime (TitlesViewController.swift:81) but to keep the Launch Screen consistent I needed to use the same gradient there. Launch Screen doesn't allow to use custom code so I generated a UIImage from the CAGradientLayer, saved it to my Mac, added it to the XCAssets and put it in the Launch Screen inside a UIImageView. After doing this I could've used this same UIImage for the TitlesViewController background but I felt like the original code for the creation of the layer should remain there for the purpose of this project

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Notes

• I'm delaying the fetching of the posts in TitleViewController.swift:36 by 4 seconds so the loading clock can be seen, if this is removed the data is shown almost instantly
• I decided not to include more tests to keep it simple, as requested. Same reason I didn't add UI tests
• The overall UI of the app is definitely not ideal but I chose to spend time with the code structure and the architecture of the app rather than on its UI
• I'm pretty happy with how the loading clock works although again, not ideal UI 🙈