MirrorType

Reflection in Swift is a limited affair, providing read-only access to a subset of type metadata. While far from the rich array of run-time hackery familiar to seasoned Objective-C developers, Swift’s tools enable the immediate feedback and sense of exploration offered by Xcode Playgrounds.

Perhaps Swift’s strict type checking obviates the need for reflection. With variable types typically known at compile time, there might not be cause for further examination or branching. Then again, a hefty number of Cocoa APIs dole out AnyObject instances at the drop of a hat, leaving us to cast about for the matching type.

This week, we’ll reflect on reflection in Swift, its mirror types, and MirrorType, the protocol that binds them together.

MirrorType

The entry point for reflection is the reflect function, which can take an instance of any type as its single parameter and returns a MirrorType. Now, MirrorType is something of an oddity for the Swift standard libary: a protocol used as a type. Other than the ubiquitous AnyObject, to date no other protocol is used this way. The particular MirrorType-conforming instance that you receive depends on the type passed to reflect—Swift’s internals define mirrors for types such as Array, Dictionary, Optional, and Range, along with more generic mirrors for structs, classes, tuples, and metatypes.

MirrorType provides the nascent reflection API that Swift offers, wrapping a value along with its type information, information about its children, and different representations of the instance. Mirrors have the following properties:

• value: access to the original reflected value, but with type Any.
• valueType: the Type of the original reflected value—equivalent to value.dynamicType.
• count: the number of logical children. For a collection, like Array or Set, this is the number of elements; for a struct, this is the number of stored properties.
• disposition: a value from the MirrorDisposition enumeration, intended to help the IDE choose how to display the value. MirrorDisposition has eleven cases:
  • IndexContainer, KeyContainer, MembershipContainer, Container: used for collections.
  • Optional: used for optional values. Implicitly unwrapped optionals are skipped over by reflect() to fetch the reflection of the unwrapped value.
  • Aggregate: used for Swift types that bridge to Objective-C and for Objective-C types that have been augmented for use with Swift. For example, Float has an Aggregate disposition while the non-bridged Float80 returns Struct, and UIView (extended for Reflectable conformance), has an Aggregate disposition while the unadorned UIBarButtonItem returns ObjCObject.
  • ObjCObject: by contrast with Aggregate, used for unextended Objective-C classes.
  • Tuple: used for tuple values.
  • Struct, Class, Enum: used as fallback cases for types that don’t fall into any of the above categories.
• objectIdentifier: the unique object identifier for a class or metatype instance.
• summary: a string description of the value.
• quickLookObject: a QuickLookObject instance holding a visual or text representation of the value. Its behavior is similar to the debugQuickLookObjectwe covered a few weeks back.

Additionally, a mirror has an Int-based subscript that returns a (String, MirrorType) tuple for each child. That’s the name of the property/key/index and a mirror of the value.

So how can we put MirrorType to use? Let’s suppose we have a group of numbers in a tuple that we want to use for a lottery ticket, but we need to convert them to an [Int] array first:

letlotteryTuple=(4,8,15,16,23,42)

Rather than extracting the pieces of the tuple one by one (i.e., lotteryType.0, lotteryTuple.1, etc.), we can use reflect() to iterate over the elements:

// create a mirror of the tupleletlotteryMirror=reflect(lotteryTuple)// loop over the elements of the mirror to build an arrayvarlotteryArray:[Int]=[]foriin0..<lotteryMirror.count{let(index,mirror)=lotteryMirror[i]ifletnumber=mirror.valueas?Int{lotteryArray.append(number)}}println(lotteryArray)// [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42]

Not bad.

Mapping a Mirror

If we could map over the elements in a mirror, reflecting over an instance’s properties or elements would be a bit easier. Let’s write a mapReflection function that takes an instance of any type and a transforming closure:

funcmapReflection<T,U>(x:T,@noescapetransform:(String,MirrorType)->U)->[U]{varresult:[U]=[]letmirror=reflect(x)foriin0..<mirror.count{result.append(transform(mirror[i]))}returnresult}

Now we can quite simply print all the logical children of any instance:

letprintChild:(String,MirrorType)->()={println("\($0): \($1.value)")}mapReflection(lotteryTuple,printChild)// .0: 4// .1: 8// ...mapReflection(lotteryArray,printChild)// [0]: 4// [1]: 8// ...mapReflection(CGRect.zeroRect,printChild)// origin: (0.0, 0.0)// size: (0.0, 0.0)

That output might look familiar to those who have used Swift’s dump function before. dump uses reflection recursively to print out an instance’s children, their children, and so on:

dump(CGRect.zeroRect)// ▿ (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)//   ▿ origin: (0.0, 0.0)//     - x: 0.0//     - y: 0.0//   ▿ size: (0.0, 0.0)//     - width: 0.0//     - height: 0.0

Custom-Cut Mirrors

Beyond dump, Xcode also uses mirrors extensively for the display of values in a Playground, both in the results pane on the right side of a Playground window and in captured value displays. Custom types don’t start out with a custom mirror, so their display can leave something to be desired. Let’s look at the default behavior of a custom type in a Playground and then see how a custom MirrorType can improve that display.

For our custom type, we’ll use a simple struct to hold information about a WWDC session:

/// Information for a single WWDC session.structWWDCSession{/// An enumeration of the different WWDC tracks.enumTrack:String{caseFeatured="Featured"caseAppFrameworks="App Frameworks"caseDistribution="Distribution"caseDeveloperTools="Developer Tools"caseMedia="Media"caseGraphicsAndGames="Graphics & Games"caseSystemFrameworks="System Frameworks"caseDesign="Design"}letnumber:Intlettitle:Stringlettrack:Trackletsummary:String?}letsession801=WWDCSession(number:801,title:"Designing for Future Hardware",track:.Design,summary:"Design for tomorrow's products today. See examples...")

By default, reflection on a WWDCSession instance uses the built-in _StructMirror type. This provides a property-based summary on the right (useful) but only the class name in a captured value pane (not so useful):

To provide a richer representation of a WWDCSession, we’ll implement a new type, WWDCSessionMirror. This type must conform to MirrorType, including all the properties listed above:

structWWDCSessionMirror:MirrorType{privatelet_value:WWDCSessioninit(_value:WWDCSession){_value=value}varvalue:Any{return_value}varvalueType:Any.Type{returnWWDCSession.self}varobjectIdentifier:ObjectIdentifier?{returnnil}vardisposition:MirrorDisposition{return.Struct}// MARK: Child propertiesvarcount:Int{return4}subscript(index:Int)->(String,MirrorType){switchindex{case0:return("number",reflect(_value.number))case1:return("title",reflect(_value.title))case2:return("track",reflect(_value.track))case3:return("summary",reflect(_value.summary))default:fatalError("Index out of range")}}// MARK: Custom representationvarsummary:String{return"WWDCSession \(_value.number) [\(_value.track.rawValue)]: \(_value.title)"}varquickLookObject:QuickLookObject?{return.Text(summary)}}

In the summary and quickLookObject properties, we provide our custom representation of a WWDCSession—a nicely formatted string. Note, in particular, that the implementation of count and the subscript are completely manual. The default mirror types ignore private and internal access modifiers, so a custom mirror could be used to hide implementation details, even from reflection.

Lastly, we must link WWDCSession to its custom mirror by adding conformance to the Reflectable protocol. Conformance only requires a single new method, getMirror(), which returns a MirrorType—in this case, our shiny new WWDCSessionMirror:

extensionWWDCSession:Reflectable{funcgetMirror()->MirrorType{returnWWDCSessionMirror(self)}}

That’s it! The Playground now uses our custom representation instead of the default:

In the absence of Printable conformance, println() and toString() will also pull the string representation from an instance’s mirror.

In its current form, Swift reflection is more novelty than powerful feature. With new Swift functionality surely right around the corner at WWDC, this article may prove to have a very short shelf life indeed. But in the mean time, should you find the need for introspection, you’ll know just where to look.