One of the major structural changes I need to accomplish for Snapthread 2.0 is switching to the use of container view controllers. For those who don’t know, container view controllers allow you to embed one or more view controllers inside a parent view controller, which can then manage transitions between its children. UINavigationController and UITabBarController are examples of container view controllers in UIKit, but you can also create your own.

I’ve never used custom container view controllers before, so of course I hit Google to see what I could find. John Sundell has a great introduction to the topic and I really liked the series by Mike Woelmer as well. (Edit: I also meant to include this fantastic article by Ben Sandofsky) The first thing I learned was that if you want to be able to switch between child view controllers, you should probably set them up in code instead of Interface Builder, which only allows a single embed segue between parent and child. I wasn’t ready for that though, so I decided to take a baby step and find a situation where a single parent-child relationship made sense.

Snapthread’s main view controller is…well, massive. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many lines of code it is, but after combing through it, I realized at least 400 lines were devoted to setting up the AVPlayer, handling play/pause events, observing the status of the current AVPlayerItem, scrubbing, adding the watermark, etc. Clearly, the video player was a good candidate for having its own view controller.

So, I created a VideoPlayerViewController class and began copy and pasting everything relevant to setting up the AVPlayerLayer, displaying time elapsed/remaining, scrubbing, etc. In Interface Builder, I added a new view controller and copied over the video preview view, which is a custom UIView class that resizes its own AVPlayerLayer, and the player controls.

I deleted the video player and controls from my main view controller and replaced it with a container view from the Object Library. I hooked it up to my new view controller using an embed segue.

Next, I had to figure out how to communicate between my main view controller and the video player. Communicating between the player and its parent was easy; I just set up a delegate with methods for responding to changes in AVPlayerItem status and duration (if it exceeds a certain duration, the UI displays a warning that the user needs to purchase Premium in order to export). I set the delegate using prepare(for segue:), which is called when the child VC is embedded.

There were times when I needed to tell the player to do something from the main view controller, however, such as hide its controls or clear its watermark. I wasn’t quite sure how to handle that. Using notifications was one option, but it just didn’t feel right for some reason. I ended up storing a reference to my VideoPlayerViewController and referencing it directly. That’s probably bad practice, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay, as I don’t plan on using that particular video player with any other view controller.

Overall, I feel slightly more comfortable using container views now, and I think I’m ready to tackle the next step: transitioning between child view controllers. I plan to post more about new things I’m learning; each of those posts will be prefaced by “Journey to 2.0” if you’re interested (or want to ignore them, lol).