Book Image

SwiftUI Essentials – iOS 14 Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

SwiftUI Essentials – iOS 14 Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Do you want to create iOS apps with SwiftUI, Xcode 12, and Swift 5.3, and want to publish it on the app store? This book helps you achieve these skills with a step-by-step approach. This course first walks you through the steps necessary to set up an iOS development environment together and introduces Swift Playgrounds to learn and experiment with Swift—specifically, the Swift 5.3 programming language. After establishing key concepts of SwiftUI and project architecture, this course provides a guided tour of Xcode in SwiftUI development mode. The book also covers the creation of custom SwiftUI views and explains how these views are combined to create user interface layouts, including the use of stacks, frames, and forms. One of the more important skills you’ll learn is how to integrate SwiftUI views into existing UIKit-based projects and explain the integration of UIKit code into SwiftUI. Finally, the book explains how to package up a completed app and upload it to the app store for publication. Along the way, the topics covered in the book are put into practice through detailed tutorials, the source code for which is also available for download. By the end of this course, you will be able to build your own apps for iOS 14 using SwiftUI and publish it on the app store. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/swiftui-ios14/
Table of Contents (56 chapters)
56
Index

5.8 The Swift Optional Type

The Swift optional data type is a new concept that does not exist in most other programming languages. The purpose of the optional type is to provide a safe and consistent approach to handling situations where a variable or constant may not have any value assigned to it.

Variables are declared as being optional by placing a ? character after the type declaration. The following code declares an optional Int variable named index:

var index: Int?

The variable index can now either have an integer value assigned to it or have nothing assigned to it. Behind the scenes, and as far as the compiler and runtime are concerned, an optional with no value assigned to it actually has a value of nil.

An optional can easily be tested (typically using an if statement) to identify whether it has a value assigned to it as follows:

var index: Int?

 

if index != nil {

    // index variable has a value assigned to it

} else...