Barstool News

Assumptions

• Currently all of our network requests are GET requests. This is sufficent for the current project, but in reality our NetworkService class should handle all different types of network requests. For example, if we had a login, it would most likely require a PUT request.
• In terms of the feature, I assumed that one page of content would be sufficient. However, most real apps usually have infinite scroll implemented for features like this. If we were to remove this assumption, I would use the UIScrollViewDelegate to implement paginated requests.

Edge Cases

• Handled:
  • Loading flag -- I noticed that quick consecutive taps on a cell can result in unintended multiple network requests resulting in multiple detail screens. I've handled this by creating a flag that will be set to true if there is a network request in progress ensuring that only one request is processed at any given time.
• Not handled:
  • Potential failure to load posts -- there is a possibility that the posts do not load for a variety of reasons (no internet service, server outage, etc.). In this case it is ideal to allow the user to refresh the screen manually.

Improvements

• Have our NetworkService class handle all types of url requests. This can be done simply by passing a method parameter that other services can pass when calling the perform request method.
• If the initial request to fetch the posts has failed, we can show a button that the user can press to reattempt to fetch the posts. In order to display the button, we can check if the count of posts is 0 then show a refresh button.
• In order to implement infinite scroll, we can use the UIScrollViewDelegate to fetch the next page of posts when the user has reached the bottom of the collection view. On the PostManager, we can create a page property that simply keeps track of the number of pages that has been loaded. Thus, it will know which page to fetch for upon each call.
• Currently, we are not caching any images that have been loaded. We can create an image cache using the NSCache class, using the url as keys and the UIImage object as the values. In the UIImageView+URL.swift file, we can make the update to check the cache for a given url first before making a network request.