Introducting App Profile

I’ve mentioned in a previous post about App Profle, which was named App Config (LFConfigModel) previously. In Swift, to define some constants I’ve been using struct. It has some drawback but the code looks quite clean:

struct MyConfig {
	struct URL {
		static let root = "http://na.com"
		static let promotion = "http://nb.com"
	}
	struct API {
		static let list = "v1/list"
		static let detail = "v1/detail/"
	}
}
//	To use: LF.log("root", MyConfig.URl.root)

App Profile allows you to define constants in a similar fashion, but with back-end support: such “profiles” can be managed on the server side. For example, you can change some call-to-action texts and background colors to find the best visual composition for marketing, or even some of the URLs. You can use something like Google Tag Manager to achieve something like this, but in LSwift it’s much easier to use. For example, you can define the profiles in this way:

class MyURLProfile: LFProfile {
	var root = "http://na.com"
	var promotion = "http://nb.com"
}
class MyAPIProfile: LFProfile {
	var list = "v1/list"
	var detail = "v1/detail/"
}

struct My {
	struct config {
		static let is_publisher = false
		static var url = MyURLProfile(publish:is_publisher)
		static var api = MyAPIProfile(publish:is_publisher)
	}
}

Although CloudKit would be the ideal back-end service, currently Parse is the only one that’s supporteddue to the projects I’m currently working on, which means you’ll have to init Parse before using App Profile. After that, if the is_publisher argument is set to true, the app will upload the profiles to the back-end service, which should be run at least once during development. After that, please set it to false so that it will:

• Try to get profiles from cloud;
• If profiles are obtained, they will be applied and saved locally;
• Saved profiles will be loaded straight away when the app is launched next time.

There should be a flag to disable changing profiles in an app session, which you may not like to do e.g. changing tab orders in an app session is not a good idea. It’s not implemented yet so please keep it in mind that the app profiles can be changed anytime after the first time you call them:

LF.log("root", My.config.url.root)

One more thing: I’ve talked about putting texts into App Profiles. I’ve already been working on a localization solution, which will support Storyboard and probably App Profile later. It will be put into the LThemeManager.

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