Introduction to Swift Keypaths

Dictionary Keys

released Fri, 29 Mar 2019
Swift Version 5.0

3. KeyPaths conform to Hashable

We did not see an example of this yet, but it is one of my all-time favorite keypaths functions. Every KeyPath type is Hashable which means that it can be used as a key in a dictionary. One use case for this is storing meta information about properties in a dictionary. Here, we have a dictionary that maps from partial key paths to String. It stores two different keypaths (username, age) and their titles:

let meta: [PartialKeyPath<User>: String] = [

   \User.username: \"Your Username\",

   \User.age: \"Your Age\"

]

We can now write a function renderTitle that will retrieve this meta information and print it out alongside the actual value:

func renderTitle(on: User, keyPath: AnyKeyPath) {

   if let title = meta[keyPath] {

     print(title, terminator: \": \")

   }

   print(on[keyPath: keyPath])

}



let myUser = User(username: \"Jon\", age: 44)



renderTitle(on: myUser, keyPath: \User.age)

This would print Your Age: 44

This pattern can be used for many more situations. Whenever you have information about a type, you can utilize it to store the information. Another example would be input validation.