Search code examples
iosobjective-cloose-coupling

iOS Which is better design comparing passing the whole class to view or setting piece by piece

I have a User class has some properties such as name, email, location. And I have another class called Post which has some properties such as title, contentand poster that is a instance of User.

There is a ViewController, inside the view controller there is a PostDetailView which is used to show post details. Now the view controller has a post object and I need to pass some values to PostDetailView. I have two options:

  1. Pass the whole post object through initializer, which means PostDetailView has a method -initWithFrame:post. Once the view get the post object, it can get every data inside the post.
  2. PostDetailView has some setter method such as setTitle:, setContent, setPosterName, etc. Initializer only initialize frame of view, and then using setters to pass value.

Option 1 can save lots of work in view controller but may increase coupling. Option 2 has better structure (I thought), but need additional work in both view and view controller. Therefore, my question is which one is better in terms of architecture?

Solution

  • In favor of good design and architecture it make sense to type a little more and have views decoupled from model. One technic that I've used to is to design view with properties of primitive types (String, Number etc.) and create a category for the view that has a method to configure itself with a model object of a particular type.

    You can read more about this here: http://www.objc.io/issue-1/table-views.html They talk about table view but approach can be used for any view and model with mediating controller.