iOS Live Objects/Collections

Live Objects and Live Collections

In iOS AmitySDK, we have a concept of Live Object and Live Collection. LiveObject is represented by AmityObject instance and LiveCollection is represented by an instance of AmityCollection. These are generic classes which encapsulates any other object and notifies the observer whenever any property of the encapsulated object changes.

Live Object helps to observe changes in a single object whereas Live Collection helps to observe changes in a list of objects. For example: AmityObject<AmityPost> or AmityCollection<AmityMessage>.

How it Works

SDK handles a lot of data received from various sources. Data can be present in local cache. It might also be queried from the server or received from some real-time events. This means, some data is constantly updating. The data that you are accessing at the moment can get updated by other sources and becomes out of sync.

Live Object and Live Collection helps in syncing these constantly updating data, so you will always get the most recent one. Whenever the data gets updated, you will be notified through helper methods in live object and live collection classes.

New data gets automatically collected everytime when there is an updation and user need not refresh to get the recent data.

Live collection is available for the following functionalities in user/community feeds:

• Post Collection

• Comment Collection

• Reactions Collection

• Followers/Following Collection

• Channel Collection

• Message Collection

• Channel Member Collection

• Community Collection

• Community Members Collection

Both AmityObject and AmityCollection provide methods that help to observe changes in objects. The life cycle of observation is tied to its token. As soon as the token is invalidated or deallocated, observation ends.

AmityNotificationToken

AmityNotificationToken is a simple object which keeps track of what is being observed. Each observation from Live Object or Live Collection is tied to its respective token. As soon as the token is invalidated or deallocated, observation ends. The token is declared within the scope of the class.

The token is used in combination with AmityObject or AmityCollection. We will explore it more in AmityObject and AmityCollection concepts.

AmityObject

AmityObject is a generic class that keeps track of a single object. It is a live object. In iOS AmitySDK, any object which is encapsulated by AmityObject is a live object.

Examples:

• AmityObject<AmityMessage>

• AmityObject<AmityChannel>

AmityObject class exposes the following methods:

• observe

• observeOnce

These methods help observe a live object. Whenever any property for observed object changes, the observer is triggered.

Observer

observe method can be triggered multiple times throughout the lifetime of the application as long as its associated AmityNotificationToken is retained in memory. observeOnce method, on the other hand, can only be triggered once.

Both observe and observeOnce methods will be called from the main thread so you can perform any UI update-related tasks from within the observe block itself.

• If the requested object data is stored locally on the device, the block will be called immediately with the local version of the data. This can be verified through the dataStatus property of AmityObject.

• In parallel, a request is made to server to fetch the latest version of the data. Once the data is returned, the observe block will be triggered again.

• Any future changes to that data from any sources can trigger observer.

Lifecycle: The life cycle of the observer is tied to its token. If the token is not retained, then the observer can get deallocated at any time and will not be called. Both observe and observeOnce block will be retained using token as shown below.

Invalidate token

The AmityNotificationToken provides a method called invalidate() which can be used to invalidate the token anytime. As soon as you invalidate the token, your observation stops and observe block will no longer be triggered.

Accessing Objects

There are multiple ways to access data from AmityObject. AmityObject exposes the following properties:

• dataStatus: Indicates whether the data is fresh or local

• loadingStatus: Indicates if the data is being loaded from server or not

• object: The actual object that is being tracked or encapsulated by this AmityObject

Once you add an observer block, you can access both local or fresh data as shown below.

If you want to observe fresh object just once, you can check the data status and invalidate the token once you receive the fresh object.

For observerOnce method, if data is present locally, this observer will be triggered only once with that local data. If you are looking for fresh data, use the observe block and invalidate the token once fresh data is received as shown above.

If you only care about local data and do not want to observe anything, you can also access the object property from AmityObject directly.

While this is possible, we recommend accessing object from within theobserve or observeOnce block depending on your requirement.

AmityLoadingStatus

AmityObject can be tracked for their loading status by accessing the loadingStatus property, which is of type AmityLoadingStatus and it can have one of four possible values.

• 0 (notLoading): Indicates that the data is already fresh locally and does not need to be loaded.

• 1 (loading): Indicates that the client is currently loading the data from the server.

• 2 (loaded) - Indicates that the client has successfully loaded fresh data from the server and is up to date.

• 3 (error) - Indicates that the data is unable to load due from a specific error.

AmityCollection

AmityCollection is a generic class that keeps track of a collection of objects. It is a live collection. In iOS SDK, any object which is encapsulated by AmityCollection class is a live collection.

Examples:

• AmityCollection<AmityMessage>

• AmityCollection<AmityChannel>

AmityCollection exposes these methods:

• observe

• observeOnce

These methods help to observe a live collection. Whenever any property for any object within the collection changes, the observer is triggered.

Observer

observe method can get triggered multiple times throughout the lifetime of the application as long as it's associated AmityNotificationToken is retained in memory. observeOnce, on the other hand, can only be triggered once.

Both observe and observeOnce method will be called from the main thread so you can perform any UI update related task within the observe block itself.

• If the requested data collection is stored locally on the device, the block will be called immediately with the local version of the data. This can be verified through the dataStatus property of AmityCollection.

• In parallel, a request is made to the server to fetch the latest version of the data. Once the data is returned, the observe block will be triggered again.

• Any future changes to the data from any sources can trigger observer.

Lifecycle: The life cycle of the observer for AmityCollection is also tied to its token. If the token is not retained, the observer can get deallocated at any time and will not be called. So, both observe and observeOnce block should be retained. You can refer to the section in AmityObject about retaining and invalidating a token.

Accessing Collection

Unlike most databases, AmityCollection does not return all data in an array. Instead, data is fetched one by one using the objectAtIndex: method. This allows the framework to store most of the actual result on disk, and load them in memory only when necessary.

AmityCollection also exposes a count property which determines the number of objects present in a collection.

With these two public interfaces, you can create a robust list UI for your use case. Similar to AmityObject, AmityCollection also exposes dataStatus and loadingStatus property.

Let's look at the typical flow when accessing a collection data.

If you want to observe only fresh or local collection, you can access it using thedataStatus property and invalidate the token once you have accessed your desired collection data.

For observerOnce method, if data is present locally, this observer will be triggered only once with that local data. If you are looking for fresh data, use observe block and invalidate the token once fresh data is received as shown above.

Observer also provides you with the AmityCollectionChange object which contains indexes of what is added, deleted, or modified in a collection. You can also refer to these properties to update the UI for the list.

Iterate through collection

While SDK provides liveCollection.object(at:) to access a single item, you might often find the need to iterate through all objects in the collection. The SDK has a convenient way to do this using .allObjects().

Using the above method is the same with this logic:

Pagination

AmityCollection in SDK returns a maximum of 20 items per page. It has nextPage() and previousPage() method to fetch more data. It also exposes hasNext and hasPrevious property to check if next page or previous page is present.

Once next page is available, the same observe block gets triggered and you can access the collection as shown above. If you want to shrink the collection to the original first page, you can do so by calling resetPage() method on the same collection.

One typical usage of Live Collection is in UITableView. Below is an example of fetching a collection and displaying it in a tableview.

SwiftUI Support

AmityObject and AmityCollection are now observable object with its properties marked with @Published annotation. Now you can use live object & live collection directly within your SwiftUI views.

Access AmityObject & AmityCollection in SwiftUI views

Since AmityObject & AmityCollection are observable object, it can be used as an ObservedObject within SwiftUI views. We recommend to create small view which observes AmityCollection & AmityObject as ObservedObject as shown in code sample below.

Live Object - SwiftUI

Live Collection - SwiftUI

Since the properties are published, If you are using Combine Framework, you can also subscribe to changes on those properties.

Live Object - Combine

Live Collection - Combine

FAQ’s:

#1: LiveCollection is not updated when used from inside of another observable class.

AmityCollection & AmityObject is an ObservableObject. When this live collection or live object is embedded inside another Observable Object, SwiftUI cannot observe the changes in snapshot occurring within Live collection & Live object. As a result, there might be a situation where you see your view is not getting updated even when snapshot(s) are updated. This is a common problem with nested observable object in SwiftUI.

To solve this issue we recommend to create a specific view which observes AmityCollection & AmityObject as @ObservedObject as shown in code example.

#2: Published property still returns old values.

Since the properties of AmityCollection & AmityObject are marked with @Published annotation, the publishing of changes occurs in the property’s willSet block, meaning that any subscribers will receive an update before the property is changed. This behaviour can easily lead to unexpected bugs.

For more details, please refer to https://developer.apple.com/documentation/combine/published