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Loading images with UIImage

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Loading images with UIImage

At this point we have our original table view controller full of pictures to select, plus a detail view controller in our storyboard. The next goal is to show the detail screen when any table row is tapped, and have it show the selected image.

To make this work we need to add another specially named method to ViewController. This one is called tableView(_, didSelectRowAt:), which takes an IndexPath value just like cellForRowAt that tells us what row we’re working with. This time we need to do a bit more work:

  1. We need to create a property in DetailViewController that will hold the name of the image to load.
  2. We’ll implement the didSelectRowAt method so that it loads a DetailViewController from the storyboard.
  3. Finally, we’ll fill in viewDidLoad() inside DetailViewController so that it loads an image into its image view based on the name we set earlier.

Let’s solve each of those in order, starting with the first one: creating a property in DetailViewController that will hold the name of the image to load.

This property will be a string – the name of the image to load – but it needs to be an optional string because when the view controller is first created it won’t exist. We’ll be setting it straight away, but it still starts off life empty.

So, add this property to DetailViewController now, just below the existing @IBOutlet line:

var selectedImage: String?

That’s the first task done, so onto the second: implement didSelectRowAt so that it loads a DetailViewController from the storyboard.

When we created the detail view controller, you gave it the storyboard ID “Detail”, which allows us to load it from the storyboard using a method called instantiateViewController(withIdentifier:). Every view controller has a property called storyboard that is either the storyboard it was loaded from or nil. In the case of ViewController it will be Main.storyboard, which is the same storyboard that contains the detail view controller, so we’ll be loading from there.

We can break this task down into three smaller tasks, two of which are new:

  1. Load the detail view controller layout from our storyboard.
  2. Set its selectedImage property to be the correct item from the pictures array.
  3. Show the new view controller.

The first of those is done by calling instantiateViewController, but it has two small complexities. First, we call it on the storyboard property that we get from Apple’s UIViewController type, but it’s optional because Swift doesn’t know we came from a storyboard. So, we need to use ? just like when we were setting the text label of our cell: “try doing this, but do nothing if there was a problem.”

Second, even though instantiateViewController() will send us back a DetailViewController if everything worked correctly, Swift thinks it will return back a UIViewController because it can’t see inside the storyboard to know what’s what.

This will seem confusing if you’re new to programming, so let me try to explain using an analogy. Let’s say you want to go out on a date tonight, so you ask me to arrange a couple of tickets to an event. I go off, find tickets, then hand them to you in an envelope. I fulfilled my part of the deal: you asked for tickets, I got you tickets. But what tickets are they – tickets for a sporting event? Tickets for an opera? Train tickets? The only way for you to find out is to open the envelope and look.

Swift has the same problem: instantiateViewController() has the return type UIViewController, so as far as Swift is concerned any view controller created with it is actually a UIViewController. This causes a problem for us because we want to adjust the property we just made in DetailViewController. The solution: we need to tell Swift that what it has is not what it thinks it is.

The technical term for this is “typecasting”: asking Swift to treat a value as a different type. Swift has several ways of doing this, but we’re going to use the safest version: it effectively means, “please try to treat this as a DetailViewController, but if it fails then do nothing and move on.”

Once we have a detail view controller on our hands, we can set its selectedImage property to be equal to pictures[indexPath.row] just like we were doing in cellForRowAt – that’s the easy bit.

The third mini-step is to make the new screen show itself. You already saw that view controllers have an optional storyboard property that either contains the storyboard they were loaded from or nil. Well, they also have an optional navigationController property that contains the navigation controller they are inside if it exists, or nil otherwise.

This is perfect for us, because navigation controllers are responsible for showing screens. Sure, they provide that nice gray bar across the top that you see in lots of apps, but they are also responsible for maintaining a big stack of screens that users navigate through.

By default they contain the first view controller you created for them in the storyboard, but when new screens are created you can push them onto the navigation controller’s stack to have them slide in smoothly just like you see in Settings. As more screens are pushed on, they just keep sliding in. When users go back a screen – i.e. by tapping Back or by swiping from left to right – the navigation controller will automatically destroy the old view controller and free up its memory.

Those three mini-steps complete the new method, so it’s time for the code. Please add this method to ViewController.swift – I’ve added comments to make it easier to understand:

override func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, didSelectRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) {
    // 1: try loading the "Detail" view controller and typecasting it to be DetailViewController
    if let vc = storyboard?.instantiateViewController(withIdentifier: "Detail") as? DetailViewController {
        // 2: success! Set its selectedImage property
        vc.selectedImage = pictures[indexPath.row]

        // 3: now push it onto the navigation controller
        navigationController?.pushViewController(vc, animated: true)
    }
}

Let’s look at the if let line a bit more closely for a moment. There are three parts of it that might fail: the storyboard property might be nil (in which case the ? will stop the rest of the line from executing), the instantiateViewController() call might fail if we had requested “Fzzzzz” or some other invalid storyboard ID, and the typecast – the as? part – also might fail, because we might have received back a view controller of a different type.

So, three things in that one line have the potential to fail. If you’ve followed all my steps correctly they won’t fail, but they have the potential to fail. That’s where if let is clever: if any of those things return nil (i.e., they fail), then the code inside the if let braces won’t execute. This guarantees your program is in a safe state before any action is taken.

There’s only one small thing left to do before you can take a look at the results: we need to make the image actually load into the image view in DetailViewController.

This new code will draw on a new data type, called UIImage. This doesn't have "View" in its name like UIImageView does, so it's not something you can view – it's not something that's actually visible to users. Instead, UIImage is the data type you'll use to load image data, such as PNG or JPEGs.

When you create a UIImage, it takes a parameter called named that lets you specify the name of the image to load. UIImage then looks for this filename in your app's bundle, and loads it. By passing in the selectedImage property here, which was sent from ViewController, this will load the image that was selected by the user.

However, we can’t use selectedImage directly. If you remember, we created it like this:

var selectedImage: String?

That ? means it might have a value or it might not, and Swift doesn’t let you use these “maybes” without checking them first. This is another opportunity for if let: we can check that selectedImage has a value, and if so pull it out for usage; otherwise, do nothing.

Add this code to viewDidLoad() inside DetailViewController, after the call to super.viewDidLoad():

if let imageToLoad = selectedImage {
    imageView.image  = UIImage(named: imageToLoad)
}

The first line is what checks and unwraps the optional in selectedImage. If for some reason selectedImage is nil (which it should never be, in theory) then the imageView.image line will never be executed. If it has a value, it will be placed into imageToLoad, then passed to UIImage and loaded.

OK, that’s it: press play or Cmd+R now to run the app and try it out! You should be able to select any of the pictures to have them slide in and displayed full screen.

Notice that we get a Back button in the navigation bar that lets us return back to ViewController. If you click and drag carefully, you’ll find you can create a swipe gesture too – click at the very left edge of the screen, then drag to the right, just as you would do with your thumb on a phone.