When developing with Cocoa/UIKit, the most common used architecture is MVC.

• Model-View-Controller

What is the architecture when using SwiftUI? Someone says it is MVVM. Someone says it is MV, MVC without C. I would like say it would be M-VC, Model with View and Controller.

• Stop using MVVM for SwiftUI

M-VC

We want every element to be simple. For MV architecture, the View is too heavy for me. For M-VC, we want the View as simple as possible. The extra parts we think it to be Controller.

Split View into small Views

For a SwiftUI View, when one of the @State properties changed, all @State properties in the same view will be updated. If this is overhead, you can split those @State properties to another view, that will reduce CPU usage and speed up your app.

• Why Timer Change Will Trigger LazyVGrid View Update?
• Demystify SwiftUI

After investigation, I found that this issue was caused by sorted method with keyPath.

List { // this list crashes
    ForEach(dayList.items.sorted(by: \.startDate, ascending: true)) { currentItem in
        ItemRowSwiftUIView(currentItem: currentItem)
    }.onDelete(perform: { indexSet in
        removeItems(atOffsets: indexSet)
    })
}
    
List { // this list doesn't crash
    ForEach(dayList.items.sorted(by: {
        $0.startDate < $1.startDate
    })) { currentItem in
        ItemRowSwiftUIView(currentItem: currentItem)
    }.onDelete(perform: { indexSet in
        removeItems(atOffsets: indexSet)
    })
}

struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
    static var previews: some View {
        ContentView(dayList: DayList())
    }
}

When using the keyPath to sort, the preview crashed. That because sorted by keyPath used realm and for a unmanaged object dayList, there is no realm.

So we need to create a realm first.

struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
    static var previews: some View {
        ContentView(dayList: createRealmAndGetDayList())
    }

    static func createRealmAndGetDayList() -> DayList {
        let realm = try! Realm(configuration: Realm.Configuration(inMemoryIdentifier: "for debug"))
        let dayList = DayList()
        
        try! realm.write({
            realm.add(dayList, update: .all)
        })

        return dayList
    }
}

Then everything will work.

You may have already known how to using Realm with Swift. In case you were not, we would like to have a quick review.

Realm With Swift

Model

import Foundation
import RealmSwift

class Item:Object, ObjectKeyIdentifiable {
    @Persisted(primaryKey: true) var _id: ObjectId
    @Persisted var title = ""
    @Persisted(originProperty: "items") var group: LinkingObjects<Group>
}

class Group:Object, ObjectKeyIdentifiable {
    @Persisted(primaryKey: true) var _id: ObjectId
    @Persisted var items = RealmSwift.List<Item>()
}

Get Results

let realm = try! Realm()
let groups = realm.objects(Group.self)

Mutating Data

try! realm.write {
    let group = Group()
    realm.add(group, update: .all)
    group.items.append(Item())
}

Realm With SwiftUI

Model in Realm with SwiftUI is the same. However, how to getting results and mutating data are much different.

Get Results

Results are got implicitly.

import SwiftUI
import RealmSwift

struct ContentView: View {
    @ObservedResults(Group.self) var groups
    
    var body: some View {
        if let group = groups.last {
            MainSwiftUIView(group: group)
        } else {
            ProgressView().onAppear(perform: {
                $groups.append(Group())
            })
        }
    }
}

You can think @ObservedResults as some kind of Binding struct, its wrappedValue is the original Realm results.

public var wrappedValue: RealmSwift.Results<ResultType> { get }

When you call @ObservedResults(Group.self) var groups, Realm automatically created implicitly.

public init(_ type: ResultType.Type, configuration: RealmSwift.Realm.Configuration? = nil, filter: NSPredicate? = nil, keyPaths: [String]? = nil, sortDescriptor: RealmSwift.SortDescriptor? = nil)

Mutating Data

@ObservedResults(Group.self) var groups

The variable groups and $groups are different. groups is a frozen object of Group. While $groups is a ObservedResults object, it is unfrozen and is used to do mutation.

Frozen object mean the state of the object is unchanged, the normal Realm object is live and unfrozen.

private func add() {
    $group.items.append(Item())
}

@ObservedRealmObject

@ObservedRealmObject is similar like @ObservedResults, but it is not results, but for single realm object.

You should take care of the spelling. As there are a lot similar spellings. Like @ObservableObject, @ObservedObject, they all look like @ObservedRealmObject, if you misspell them, the compiler won't notify and you app won't work.
Also, there are two common naming space issues. RealmSwift.List<T> and SwiftUI.App.

References

• Use Realm Database with SwiftUI and Combine