Combining multiple Combine publishers in Swift
I’ve already covered a few essential topics from the Combine framework story. We talked about handling errors and chaining operations, but today I want to talk about running multiple operations in parallel and handing results in a single place. This week we will learn how to use zip, merge and combine operators.
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Zip
Zip operator is handy when you have a couple of publishers and need to wait for values from both of them. For example, assume that you are working on some kind of store app. You have a product screen where you show product details and the list of related products. In this case, you might want to display details and associated products at the same time. You can achieve this behavior using the Zip operator.
final class ProductViewModel: ObservableObject {
@Published private(set) var product: Product?
@Published private(set) var related: [Product] = []
let service = ProductsService()
private var cancellable: AnyCancellable?
func fetch(_ product: UUID) {
cancellable = Publishers.Zip(
service.fetch(product),
service.fetchRelatedProducts(for: product)
)
.sink(
receiveCompletion: { print($0) },
receiveValue: { [weak self] product, related in
self?.product = product
self?.related = related
}
)
}
}
To learn more about designing API with Combine publishers, take a look at my “Designing API using Combine framework” post.
As you can see in the example above, we use Zip to fetch product details and related products. As soon as both publishers emit the value sink subscriber will assign them to the stored properties.
CombineLatest
The main downside of the Zip operator is that it delivers values only when all the publishers emit. Sometimes we want to obtain all the values even when some of them change more often than others. For example, assume that you are working on a signup screen where you have text fields for email, password, and repeated password. You also have a signup button that should be enabled when all the text fields contain valid data.
final class SignUpViewModel: ObservableObject {
@Published var email: String = ""
@Published var password1: String = ""
@Published var password2: String = ""
var isValid: AnyPublisher<Bool, Never> {
Publishers
.CombineLatest3($email, $password1, $password2)
.allSatisfy { email, password1, password2 in
email.contains("@") &&
password1.count > 7 &&
password1 == password2
}.eraseToAnyPublisher()
}
}
Here we have the signup screen’s view model. It contains a few stored properties which we are going to use in our view. It also has isValid computed property that creates a validation publisher.
As you can see, we use the CombineLatest operator to obtain the latest values from all the publishers. CombineLatest publisher collects the first value from all three publishers and emits them as a single tuple. CombineLatest continues sending new values even when only one publisher emits a new value.
On the other hand, the Zip operator sends a new value only when all the publishers emit new values.
MergeMany
Merge is another helpful operator provided by the Combine framework that you can use to join a few different publishers with the same output type. I often use the Merge operator while fetching locally cached data and fetching new data from the webserver.
final class FavoritesViewModel: ObservableObject {
@Published private(set) var products: [Product] = []
let service = ProductsService()
func fetch() {
Publishers.MergeMany(
service.fetchCachedFavorites(),
service.fetchFavorites()
)
.replaceError(with: [])
.assign(to: &$products)
}
}
As you can see, the MergeMany operator allows me to create a single pipe for cached and fresh data where the cached information usually appears first and then replaced by new data.
To learn about building custom Combine operators, take a look at my “Building custom Combine operators in Swift” post.
Conclusion
This week we learned about operators of the Combine framework, which allows us to build complex data pipelines by zipping and merging multiple publishers. I hope you enjoy the post. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask your questions related to this post. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!