SWAPI_Playgrounds

In this project students will send HTTP requests in Postman and then in Xcode Playgrounds. In the finished playground, they will perform a fetch for a Person and then a series of fetches for each Film in which the person appears.

Part Zero - Familiarity with the Documentation

• Find which endpoints to hit for people and films
• Look at a sample response (JSON)
• Determine how to structure your model

All data in this project is retrieved from https://swapi.co/. Because your project depends entirely on communication to the server, you need to determine two things:

• How/where to talk to the server (outgoing)
• How to understand the response (incoming)

1. Visit the above URL and look at the documentation. The base URL is prominently displayed on a label. https://swapi.co/api/. All requests to the server will begin with that URL.
2. The sample request has two components added to it - people/, the person endpoint we'll be hitting, and 1/ the "ID" for a particular person. In this case, Luke Skywalker.
3. You have your Person endpoint, but you still need the Film endpoint. At the top-right, hit "Documentation" and then look for "Films".
4. It has the same base URL but this time the endpoint is named films/. According to the documentation, the Film endpoint also takes an ID.
5. You now have both of your endpoints.

Part One - Postman

Character

• Install Postman if you haven't already and open up a new request.

• Paste the full URL for a Person and hit Send. If successful, Postman will print out JSON person information. If you aren't getting correct info, make sure your URL is formatted correctly. https://swapi.co/api/people/{CHARACTER_ID}

• The field "films" is an array of URL strings. Copy one of these to your clipboard and open a new tab in Postman.

• Paste the film URL and hit Send. The response JSON is your Film model.

• You now have both JSON responses and are ready to declare your models in Swift.

Part Two - Models

• In a new Swift playground, create a Person struct. Person is a Swift representation of JSON data, so its properties need to be based on the JSON you received in Postman.

• Give Person name: String and films: [URL] properties. Add any other properties you would also like to decode. Make sure to spell them identically to the JSON.

• Create a Film struct and, using the JSON, give it properties for title, opening_crawl and release_date. It's ok that your property names are written in snake_case. In the future we'll learn strategies to avoid this.

• Conform both of your types to Decodable.

Part Three - SwapiService

GET Person

• Below your two custom types, create a class named SwapiService. This class will be responsible for fetching data from SWAPI and parsing it into your models.

• Since both fetches use the same base URL, add it to the top level of your SwapiService. static private let baseURL = URL(string: "https://swapi.co/api/")

• Declare a static function "fetchPerson" that takes an id of type Int and a completion block.

static func fetchPerson(id: Int, completion: @escaping (Person?) -> Void) {
    // 1 - Prepare URL
    
    // 2 - Contact server
    
    // 3 - Handle errors
    
    // 4 - Check for data
    
    // 5 - Decode Person from JSON
}

• Step one is to prepare your URL. Unwrap the base URL and in the else clause, call completion(nil).

• Declare finalURL by calling baseURL.appendingPathComponent() and pass in the rest of the Person endpoint path.

• To contact the server, call URLSession.shared.dataTask(with:completion:). Pass in your URL and then hover over the completion block and hit "return" to expand it.

• Add .resume() to the closing bracket of your completion block.

• Name the arguments data, _ and error.

• The next step is to handle errors inside the data task. Use if-let to unwrap the optional error. Print it out and call completion(nil) if there is one. Any time completion is called, return from the function as well.

• Use guard let to unwrap the data. As before, call completion in the else clause.

Because decoding is a throwing function, the rest of the data task will take place inside of a do-catch block.

• In the do portion. Declare an instance of JSONDecoder and name it "decoder".

• Call the decoder to decode a Person from the data. You have to try in case it throws an error. let person = try decoder.decode(Person.self, from: data)

• If person successfully decodes, complete with it.

• In the catch block, print out the error and complete with nil.

• Test out your fetch function by calling it and printing out the resulting Person. If it fails, your prior error handling should print an error describing why.

SwapiService.fetchPerson(id: 10) { person in
    if let person = person {
        print(person)
    }
}

GET Film

• Declare a static function that takes in a URL and completion block of type (Film?) -> Void.

static func fetchFilm(url: URL, completion: @escaping (Film?) -> Void) {
    // 1 - Contact server
    
    // 2 - Handle errors
    
    // 3 - Check for data
    
    // 4 - Decode Film from JSON
}

This function takes in a completed URL, so you wont need to do any additional preparation on it.

• Call URLSession.shared.dataTask(with:completion:). Pass in the url, expand it and give the same argument names as before.

• Call .resume() at the end of the completion block.

• Use if-let to unwrap the error and guard let to unwrap data. Don't forget to call completion(nil) in both cases and return.

• Time to decode. Open up your do-catch and declare another JSONDecoder.

• Use the same syntax as before to decode a film. If successful, complete with it.

• Remember to handle errors and call completion in the catch block.

Part Four - Perform GET Requests

Separate Code

• Declare a function called fetchFilm(url: URL). Inside of that function, call your SwapiService and fetch a film from the passed in url.

• Print out the result of the fetch.

func fetchFilm(url: URL) {
    SwapiService.fetchFilm(url: url) { film in
        if let film = film {
            print(film)
        }
    }
}

Final Product

• Below the print statement in your Person fetch. Create a for loop and call your new function for each URL in the person's films array.

• If everything has been done correctly to this point, you are now able to pass in any person id and see the character info + all films in which it appears.