Swift Playground Tip – Using External Code Files


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One of the nice additions to the XCode 6.3 release was the introduction of a feature in Swift Playgrounds that might not be immediately obvious to you but is immensely useful. You can now easily include code in separate files. This means you can test small snippets or entire custom classes and then use that code file directly in your projects, very cool for testing and development without the need to create an entire application project.

Let's give it a go with a quick demo!

First create a new Swift Playground in Xcode, I'll assume you know how to do that by now.

01 - Starting Playground

Now we need to display the Navigator sidebar to see the files in our Playground. Incase you did not know a .playground file is really a package just like .app files, the files you create are stored inside this package making file management easy. Goto the menu and choose View > Navigators > Show Navigator Or you can use the shortcut of CMD + 0

02 - Show Navigator Menu

As you can see we currently have our Playground listed with two folders Sources and Resources. We are going to take advantage of the Sources folder by adding a new file that will contain some code we will use in our Playground. So go ahead and create a new file, I called my file ‘MoreCode.swift' which is then opened up in the editor window for us.

04 - New Swift Code File

In the new file we will create a new function that takes a number as an argument, doubles it's value and returns it for us. We do not need anything fancy here just to demonstrate a concept. So go ahead and create the function below or something of your choosing.

public func DoubleTheNumber ( i:Int ) -> Int {
    let x = i * 2 return x
    } 

Notice that we made the function public this is so the function can be made available to the Playground, it is important that anything you want to use is made available, for example a class could be set to public to provide access. Now back in our Playground we can just use the function, Thanks to Xcode you will know if something went wrong because you should see autocomplete will try and help you out.

DoubleTheNumber(5)
    // Output should show 10 

We do not need to import our file as the Playground automatically creates a module for us with our code, all we need to do is use it, how cool is that! So stop and think about the possibilities here, you could write entire classes and test them without having to compile applications!

Hopefully this was helpful to you. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @CompileSwift or comment below to share your useful Xcode and Playground tips.