Category: Swift

This post is a direct result of a conversation with a colleague in a taxi in Madrid. We were driving to Santiago Bernabéu (the Real Madrid Stadium) to demonstrate to business leaders the power of artificial intelligence.

The conversation was around the ease of use of Cognitive Services for what we call “native native” developers. We refer to those that use Objective-C, Swift or Java as ‘native native’ as frameworks like ReactNative and Xamarin are also native, but we consider these “XPlat Native”. He argued that the lack of Swift SDKs prevented the adoption of our AI services such as our Vision APIs.

I maintained that all Cognitive Service APIs are well documented, and we provide an easy to consume suit of REST APIs, which any Swift developer worth their salt should be able to use with minimal effort.

Putting money where my mouth is

Having made such a statement, it made sense for me to test if my assertion was correct by building a sample app that integrates with Cognitive Services using Swift.

Introducing Bing Image Downloader. A fully native macOS app for downloading images from Bing, developed using Swift 4.

I’ve put the code on Github for you to download and play with if you’re interested in using Cognitive Services within your Swift apps, but I’ll also explain below how I went about building the app.

Where the magic happens

In the interest of good development practices, I started by creating a Protocol (C# developers should think of these as Interfaces) to define what functions the ImageSearch class will implement.

Protocol

protocol ImageServiceProtocol {
// We will take the results and add them to hard-coded singleton class called AppData. 
func searchForImageTerm(searchTerm : String)

// We pass in a completion handler for processing the results of this func
func searchForImageTerm(searchTerm : String, completion : @escaping ([ImageSearchResult]) -> ())
}

Two Implementations for one problem

I’ve made sure to include two implementations to give you options on how you’d want to interact with Cognitive Services. The approach used in the App makes use of the Singleton class for storing AppData as well as using Alamofire for handling network requests. We’ll look at this approach first.

search For Image Term

This is the public func, which is easiest to consume.

func searchForImageTerm(searchTerm : String) {

    //Search for images and add each result to AppData
    DispatchQueue.global.(qos: .background).async {
        let totalPics = 100
        let picsPerPage = 50 
        let numPages = totalPics / picsPerPage 
        (0 ..< numPages)             
            .compactMap { self.createUrlRequest(searchTerm: searchTerm, pageOffset: $0 }             
            .foreach{ self.fetchRequest(request: $0 as NSURLRequest) }         
        .RunLoop.current.run()     } 
} 

create Url Request

private func createUrlRequest(searchTerm : String, pageOffset : Int) -> URLRequest {

    let encodedQuery = searchTerm.addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlQueryAllowed)!
    let endPointUrl = "https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/images/search"

    let mkt = "en-us"
    let imageType = "photo"
    let size = "medium" 

    // We should move these variables to app settings
    let imageCount = 100
    let pageCount = 2
    let picsPerPage = totalPics / picsPerPage 

    let url = URL(string: "\(endPointUrl)?q=\(encodedQuery)&count=\(picsPerPage)&offset=\(pageOffset * picsPerPage)&mkt=\(mkt)&imageType=\(imageType)&size=\(size)")!
        
    var request = URLRequest(url: url)
    request.setValue(apiKey, forHTTPHeaderField: "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key")
        
    return request
}

fetch Request

This is where we attempt to fetch and parse the response from Bing. If we detect an error, we log it (I’m using SwiftBeaver for logging).

If the response contains data we can decode, we’ll loop through and add each result to our AppData singleton instance.

private func fetchRequest(request : NSURLRequest){
    //This task is responsbile for downloading a page of results
    let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request as URLRequest){ (data, response, error) -> Void in
            
    //We didn't recieve a response
    guard let data = data, error == nil, response != nil else {
        self.log.error("Fetch Request returned no data : \(request.url?.absoluteString)")
        return
    }
            
    //Check the response code
    guard let httpResponse = response as? HTTPURLResponse,
        (200...299).contains(httpResponse.statusCode) else {
        self.handleServerError(response : response!)
        return
    }
            
    //Convert data to concrete type
    do
    {
        let decoder = JSONDecoder()
        let bingImageSearchResults = try decoder.decode(ImageResultWrapper.self, from: data)
                
        let imagesToAdd = bingImageSearchResults.images.filter { $0.encodingFormat != EncodingFormat.unknown }
            AppData.shared.addImages(imagesToAdd)            
        } catch {
            self.log.error("Error decoding ImageResultWrapper : \(error)")
            self.log.debug("Corrupted Base64 Data: \(data.base64EncodedString())")
        }     
     }
        
     //Tasks are created in a paused state. We want to resume to start the fetch.
     task.resume()
}   

Option two (with no 3rd party dependancies)

As a .NET developer, the next approach threw me for a while and took a little bit of reading about Closures to fully grasp. With this approach, I wanted to return an Array of ImageSearchResult type, but this proved not to be the best approach. Instead, I would need to pass in a function that can handle the array of results instead.

// Search for images with a completion handler for processing the result array
func searchForImageTerm(searchTerm : String, completion : @escaping ([ImageSearchResult]) -> ()) {
        
    //Because Cognitive Services requires a subscription key, we need to create a URLRequest to pass into the dataTask method of a URLSession instance..
    let request = createUrlRequest(searchTerm: searchTerm, pageOffset: 0)
       
    //This task is responsbile for downloading a page of results
    let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request, completionHandler: { (data, response, error) -> Void in
            
    //We didn't recieve a response
    guard let data = data, error == nil, response != nil else {
        print("something is wrong with the fetch")
        return
    }
            
    //Check the response code
    guard let httpResponse = response as? HTTPURLResponse,
    (200...299).contains(httpResponse.statusCode) else {
        self.handleServerError(response : response!)
        completion([ImageSearchResult]())
        return
    }
            
    //Convert data to concrete type
    do
    {
        let decoder = JSONDecoder()
        let bingImageSearchResults = try decoder.decode(ImageResultWrapper.self, from: data)
                
        //We use a closure to pass back our results.
        completion(bingImageSearchResults.images)
                
    } catch { self.log.error("Decoding ImageResultWrapper \(error)") }
    })
    task.resume()
}

Wrapping Up

You can find the full project on my Github page which contains everything you need to build your own copy of this app (maybe for iOS rather than macOS?).

If you have any questions, then please don’t hesitate to comment or email me!