Srdan Rasic wrote a good post on creating wrappers around value objects (like Strings, say) and custom-glue them to an application’s interface. It’s a technique I have used in my book on Mac architecture at one point but which seems to be tremendously useful for virtually anything view-related once you get to a high enough level of abstraction.

It’s weird that articles related to programming are so hard to quote. Instead of a quotation, let the resulting code illustrates what he has to say:

class ArticleViewController {
  var bodyTextView: UITextView
  var titleLabel: UILabel
  var dateLabel: UILabel
  var thumbnailImageView: UIImageView
   
  var viewModel: ArticleViewViewModel {
    didSet {
      viewModel.title.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.titleLabel.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.body.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.bodyTextView.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.date.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.dateLabel.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.thumbnail.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.thumbnailImageView.image = $0
      }
    }
  }
}

So now when viewModel’s properties change, the view controller will update the corresponding interface component. Sweet.