Articles, podcasts and news about Swift development, by John Sundell.

The flexible syntax of enums

Published on 20 Feb 2019
Basics article available: Enums

One of the things I love about Swift enums is how flexible the syntax is — both when defining cases and when handling them in a switch statement (which I always recommend, to ”force” the code to handle all various states).

// There are many different ways to define enum cases in Swift:
enum PlaybackState {
    // With one or many associated values with explicit labels:
    case paused(progress: Percentage)
    case playing(progress: Percentage, playbackSpeed: Double)
    // Without labels:
    case failed(Error)
    // Or without any associated values at all:
    case finished
}

// Regardless, we have a lot of freedom when choosing how to
// handle a case at the call site:
func updatePlaybackPositionView(for state: PlaybackState) {
    switch state {
    // We can handle multiple values, and pick which ones we
    // want to handle, and which we want to ignore:
    case .paused(let progress), .playing(let progress, _):
        view.fillRate = progress
    // Or simply ignore all associated values if they're not
    // relevant for this particular piece of code:
    case .failed, .finished:
        break
    }
}