MooVC

(pronounced "Movie see")

A demonstration of the MVC architecture as a frontend to the Movie Database

Notable Features

• Session ID and Account identifier are both stored in the Keychain securely.
• Use of the Multipeer Connectivity framework for movie sharing between nearby devices.
• A single controller (MovieListingController) is in charge of every collection view used in the app.

Assignment

This application was developed as part of a university course on the Introduction to Mobile Development on the iOS Platform. The goal was to develop an iOS application that could show users information on different movies, fetched from the TheMovieDB API, allowing users to search, and mark movies as favorites, as well as showcasing the most popular titles on common genres.

The only requirement on technical decisions was having to follow the MVC architecture strictly, which presented the need for some indirection when implementing the Discover screen but ended up making new flows such as Search and Favorites simpler to get done.

As Extra Credit, MooVC also allows users to share films with nearby friends and family, using Multipeer Connectivity through the (now unsupported) MultiPeer pod.

Features

Log In Flow

MooVC allows users with a TMDB account to log in but does not currently support a sign-up flow. The LoginViewController is responsible for the flow, in collaboration with the SessionManager singleton in order to call the "Create Request Token", "Create Session (with login)" and "Create Session" endpoints.

Discovery, Search and Favorites

The main tab of MooVC is the Discovery screen. Here users can see the most popular movies in each genre, with the option to load more films on a particular genre or go into a particular movie's details. This is managed by the DiscoverViewController.

Search offers a similar experience, but instead of grouping movies under genre, it offers a single collection that the user can search through, getting popular movies that fit the query from the API. The SearchViewController controls this tab.

Finally, as users mark films as favorites, stored by the TMDB API, they can also be seen on the "favorite movies" tab, controlled by the FavouritesViewController class.

Peer-to-peer sharing

By hopping onto the final tab, users can enable "peer to peer" sharing, to build a list of movies together with close-by friends or family. While the screen is controlled by the PeerViewController class the underlying logic of talking to other devices through the Multipeer connectivity framework is abstracted away by the MovieSharing class, to hide the details of peer finding and encoding.

Architecture

To correctly follow the MVC architecture, and because the sectioned grid displayed on the Discovery screen was implemented with a UITableView for the sections, and a horizontal UICollectionView for each row, secondary classes had to be introduced in the controller layer, to make sure that the view layer (through the UITableViewCell) did not take care of its collection view data source or delegate. Additionally, because we wanted taps on each movie card to navigate the user into the "details" screen, and because navigation was ultimately managed at the higher level of the DiscoverViewController itself, we had to create some indirection to propagate taps up to the controller layer too.

The class introduced would then be generalized to handle collection views of movie titles more broadly, be it by genre, search, or favorites, whether horizontal or in a wrapping grid. This is the MovieListingController, a class that is bound to a given collection view and is charged with populating its cells. The class links as a delegate to the collection view but forwards the didSelectItemAt message to a delegate of its own, of protocol MovieListingControllerDelegate so the view controller at the higher level could navigate accordingly.

Different extensions to the MovieListingController manage the list a bit differently. AppendingMovieListingController allows for the manual addition of films, by peers, and the InfiniteMovieListingController, in collaboration with the MovieListingPageManager and MovieListingPager, handles a paged infinite scroll.

classDiagram
    direction LR
    namespace ViewControllers {
        class DiscoverViewController
        class SearchViewController
        class FavouritesViewController
        class PeerViewController
    }

    DiscoverViewController --> "*" GenreMovieListingController
    PeerViewController --> AppendingMovieListingController
    FavouritesViewController --> InfiniteMovieListingController
    SearchViewController --> InfiniteMovieListingController

    GenreMovieListingController --|> MovieListingController
    AppendingMovieListingController --|> MovieListingController
    InfiniteMovieListingController --|> MovieListingController

    class MovieListingController {
        -movies: [Movie]
    }

    MovieListingController --> MovieListingControllerDelegate

    class MovieListingControllerDelegate {
        <<Interface>>
        didSelect(movie: Movie)
    }

    InfiniteMovieListingController *-- MovieListingPageManager
    class MovieListingPageManager {
        isInFirstPage: Bool
        restart()
        fetchPage()
    }
    MovieListingPageManager *-- MovieListingPager
    class MovieListingPager {
        <<Interface>>
        fetchPage()
    }

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