Send your request Join Sii

Are you working on a huge project where a single change can completely recompile it, leading to a loss of time waiting for it to finish? Or maybe, you are working on a single feature buried deep in your application navigation stack and you need to click through all of the pages just to be able to test a single thing? A great solution to those issues is to modularise your project!

There are several methods to achieve the desired goal, such as creating Swift Packages (discussed in the Quick and Simple Modularising your project with Swift Packages article) or breaking the project into different frameworks to follow the MicroApps approach.

Today we will focus on the second approach, where we will work on a single workspace with multiple projects (modules), that can be run independently.

In this article, I will focus on the architecture breakdown and discuss the responsibilities of particular parts of the project following the Clean Architecture solution.

Project Setup

I will not get into details in this part, as there are many articles going through the entire process step by step (one of my favorites is the Modular Architecture in iOS).

I also created the example project where you can see my interpretation of this approach. You can view the commits history to see how you can create a baseline project from scratch.

The example project includes two feature modules: WorkoutLogs and WorkoutDetails. In the first module, you will find a single scene with a list of workout logs fetched from the sample JSON file. In the second module, you will find another scene with details of the workout, which would be displayed after pressing the item from the list.

In practice, the feature modules would usually be a bit bigger than just a single scene (if this would be a commercial app, I would most likely decide to keep both list and details scene in one module), but I was trying to keep the example as simple as possible.

Only the main Application project, linking all of the modules, knows of their existence. Both feature modules are agnostic so when the user clicks on an item from the WorkoutLogs, this module does not know that it will use the WorkoutDetails module to display details of the workout. This is achieved by using the Routers/Coordinator pattern.

Since the example project contains demo applications for each feature module, we can observe that while running the WorkoutDetailsDemo app, we will immediately see the workout details page without the need to navigate it. We can observe the list of workout logs but when we click on any list items nothing will happen as the module is “contained” within a single scene. Only when we run the main Application app we can see the list of workout logs and are able to navigate the details scene upon clicking on one of them.

Clean Architecture in Framework-based Workspace

workspace

The workspace consists of the main application project, a group of separate feature modules, a group of common modules, and external dependencies.

Notice, that each feature module is a separate project, containing all the logical layers (Infrastructure, Domain, and Presentation), whereas in the common group we separate each layer into standalone projects, which can help reduce the number of dependencies for feature modules.

Application

The starting point of the workspace is your application project.

If you were going through tutorials from the Project Setup chapter, you added this project from the template “app”.

Choose a template for your new project

The key responsibility of this module is to glue all the bits and pieces together into a final product that you will publish in the AppStore.

As you can see on the diagram at the beginning of this chapter, it only contains two subgroups (folders), which are the “app” and the “resources”. Depending on your project, you may add more subgroups and responsibilities to it, but it is best to keep the application project as small as possible. In the example, the Application project is so small, that I only separated “resources” into one folder keeping two files ApplicationApp and ApplicationRouter at the root level.

The application project will most likely depend on all other feature modules as well as common modules. All of those dependencies would need to be added as an “Embed & Sign” framework in your target general settings.

application

Feature Modules

Every single module (both from the feature group and common group) should be added to the workspace as a separate project based on a “framework” template.

choose a template for your new project

Feature modules mostly depend on modules from the Common group (Infrastructure, Domain, and Presentation) but in some cases, they may depend on other feature modules.

It is important to remember to avoid any circular dependencies, but fortunately, this will be identified quite early, as the project may throw some runtime errors for this reason.

Finally, any feature modules may also use specific external dependencies that are not used by any other modules, so you can specify this in your Podfile.

Common Modules

common

As mentioned earlier, every abstraction layer in a common group (Infrastructure, Domain, and Presentation) is separated into its own project.

It all depends on the size of your project and the number of features you have in there, but for the smaller project you may only need to separate the Presentation layer (e.g. naming it CommonUI) and keep Infrastructure and Domain as one module (named CommonBusinessLogic). You may also avoid using Workers and only use Use Cases directly in your Scene components. In the example project I did not use both, instead, I used Repository directly as there was no need for using Use Cases to synchronize data from LocalRepository with ApiRepository.

I like to fragment common abstraction layers to separate projects. For example, if you have a feature module that has its own entities, and you are sure they will not be shared across the rest of the project, you may only need to depend on the infrastructure module to fetch those entities either from local storage or some API. So, in this case, depending on a Common Domain module would be redundant.
If you work on many projects within your enterprise, you might have a common code shared between the apps. This makes all modules from the Common group great candidates for conversion to external modules and sharing them across all of the apps as Swift Packages or CocoaPods.

For example, if you have a service to make network requests or store data in local storage, you can simply extract your entire Common Infrastructure to have a single place for that and reuse it across different apps as those are rarely changing.

Module Targets

workspace

The above diagram demonstrates how the project’s targets can be organized.

Starting with the Application project, as you can see it contains an application target, but also two test bundles for testing the integration of your entire workspace.

The Feature Modules can contain way more targets, though it all depends on how big and complex the given feature is. Let’s say you have the Auth module that consists of login, registration, forgot password, or terms and conditions scenes. In that module, it might be useful to add an App target to build a demo application.

This is great, as the demo application will have a different bundle identifier. So, if you run it on a device or simulator, you will see it as a different app, without overriding the main app.

snapshot

For this, you may also add UI Tests for testing interactions and coordination between scenes, or Snapshot Tests to quickly test UI elements.

If your feature does not have any UI elements and only contains some logic, then adding a dedicated demo app might be an overkill. In this case, it is better to only add a playground to demonstrate how to use the feature.

I also like to add any Mocks as a separate static library target as it is easier to reuse them across all testing bundles. That is within the given module (between Unit Tests, UI Tests, or Snapshot Tests) but also for any testing bundles from other modules.

Any Mock static libraries need to be added to a testing bundle target in Build Phases under “Link Binary With Libraries”. In this way, you can use it in your test class with “@testable import”.

domain.xcodeproj

Finally, The Common Modules are quite similar to the Feature Modules, with the only difference that they do not need to have a demo app, as they should not contain any scenes, but rather only logic or reusable generic protocols.

Replaceable Presentation Patterns Such as VIP or MVVM

What is great about the modular approach, is that each module may be treated as a separate unit, therefore it may follow different patterns or use different frameworks.

For example, you may add a shiny new Feature Module using SwiftUI and it might be easier to use the VIP presentation pattern within that module, even though your previous Feature Modules are UIKit based and are using the MVVM presentation pattern.

If you are using the Routers/Coordinators pattern, you can easily connect those features without compromising the patterns in any of the modules.

In the example project, the WorkoutLogs module is using the MVVM presentation pattern with the scene created with UIKit.

MVVM scene

Since the main Application is using SwiftUI, there is also UIViewControllerRepresentable that works as a wrapper between UIKit and SwiftUI.

However, since the WorkoutDetails module is a separate project, we can easily use a different presentation pattern for that. The scene in this module has been done with the usage of SwiftUI, therefore I have decided to use a VIP presentation pattern.

VIP scene

Those presentation approaches do not affect the rest of the project, since Workers, Use Cases or any abstraction layers from the Common modules stay the same, so we may replace our UI with different patterns at any time.

Summary

This article (as well as the example project) demonstrated solutions to some potential problems or “gotchas” that you could come across while working with Framework-Based architecture. I hope it will help you in the journey of modularising your application, to make your work much easier and more fun.

Resources

5/5 ( votes: 7)
Rating:
5/5 ( votes: 7)
Author
Avatar
Marek Loose

iOS developer with some additional experience in mobile cross-platform solutions, native Android, and Web development. If the weather is nice, he likes to spend his free time flying a paramotor, riding a motorbike, or going for a long walk with his dog Bruno. Otherwise, he spends more time coding.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You might also like

More articles

Don't miss out

Subscribe to our blog and receive information about the latest posts.

Get an offer

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our offer, feel free to contact us.

Send your request Send your request

Natalia Competency Center Director

Get an offer

Join Sii

Find the job that's right for you. Check out open positions and apply.

Apply Apply

Paweł Process Owner

Join Sii

SUBMIT

Ta treść jest dostępna tylko w jednej wersji językowej.
Nastąpi przekierowanie do strony głównej.

Czy chcesz opuścić tę stronę?