This is probably the nicest Swift Result enum ever

Until today, I had a regular-looking “fetch all” method on a Repository I am working with. It obtains all records from Core Data.

public func records() -> [Record] {
    let fetchRequest = Record.fetchRequest()
    
    var error: NSError? = nil
    let results = managedObjectContext.executeFetchRequest(fetchRequest, error: &error)
    
    if results == nil {
        logError(error!, operation: "find existing records")
        postReadErrorNotification()
        assert(false, "error fetching records")
        return []
    }
    
    return results as! [Record]
}

When I discovered the nice Result enum by Rob Rix, things changed. I talked about using a Result enum before, but haven’t used an implementation with so many cool additions.

Among my favorites is the try function. You pass it a block with a call to a Cocoa method which populates an NSErrorPointer on failure. try creates a Result.Failure(NSError) for you in return.

With that in place, the simple fetch method became even nicer:

public func records() -> [Record] {
    let fetchRequest = Record.fetchRequest()
    
    let results = try { self.managedObjectContext.executeFetchRequest(fetchRequest, error: $0) }
    
    switch results {
    case let .Success(boxedValue): return boxedValue.value as! [Record]
    case let .Failure(boxedError):
        logError(boxedError.value, operation: "find existing records")
        postReadErrorNotification()
        assert(false, "error fetching records")
        return []
    }
}

Boxing is annoying, and maybe a future Swift will make this obsolete. Until then, this works nicely and, to me, reads way better. I like that I don’t need to handle an error variable myself. And I like that the words “Success” and “Failure” are included, so no more finding out which is the happy path.