Composable SwiftUI Bindings: Case Paths

However, there is clearly something not quite right about what we have done because we made quite a few strange decisions along the way. We created properties on the Status enum to project out certain information from it, but in each case that information only made sense for one of the cases. This forced us to make some choices, and it wasn’t clear that we were making the right choice. And if we ever added a third case to this enum or choices will only increase.

So what we are seeing here is that although we better modeled our core domain to properly use an enum that precisely describes the two states our item can be in, we have also accidentally destroyed all of that preciseness by trying to project out state-specific information from the general enum for our views.

And this is happening for one really important reason: quite simply, Swift favors structs over enums.

This is something we have talked about a ton on Point-Free. Swift gives first class support of many concepts and techniques for structs for which there is no corresponding story for enums. We have explained over and over again that structs and enums are really just two sides of the same coin, and any concept we introduce for one we should try searching for the corresponding concept for enums.

In this case what we are seeing is that SwiftUI simply does not give us the tools for dealing with state that is modeled as an enum. All of the tools it gives us are heavily embedded in the world of structs and product types, which leads us to trying to shoehorn tools made for structs into the world of enums.

And so without those tools we keep instinctively turning to methods of classic encapsulation to preserve invariants of our model rather than fully leveraging the benefits of structs and enums to make invalid states of unrepresentable. The idea of encapsulation is drilled into us at a very early stage as programmers as the proper way to manage complexity, but here we are seeing that even if we try to put a nice public interface over the core model we can still have complexity leak out and infect our view.