How to Write Async Search Bar Controller

July 11, 2019

How do you handle the search if you are searching among millions of records?

What happens when a user enters some text to search and realised that he wanted to search something else or mistyped something?

Ideally, when a user changes the text we should stop our search and begin a search with the new text entered by a user.

How should we write such a code in swift to make sure we cancel the search before starting a new search?

Operation Queue is a good way to handle these kinds of situations. So, let’s get our hands dirty to write a piece of code for it.

We need a delegate which provides a set of APIs to use search functionality as below:

We just wrote a SearchControllerDelegate protocol which has properties and methods as:

Properties:

  • searchQueue to perform Async search task.
  • searchResult stores results returned from the search.

Methods:

  • searchDisplayController(controller:SearchViewController, searchText:String) to start a search with the searchText
  • cancelSearch() to cancel the search

Here, how do we use delegate protocol in our ViewController:

How to connect SearchControllerDelegate to UI:

A simple example of the Async search can be found here.

Originally published at Medium

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