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iOS

Posted by Dennis Parussini
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Dennis Parussini
Treehouse Project Reviewer

Help with Swift Enum and it's instances!!!

Hi,

my question is as follows:

Do I need to assign a member value to an enum every time I create an instance of it? I think I have to, but want to make sure. In a Playground I created the following Enum and a designated initializer.

enum Names {
    case Tom, Jenny

    init() {
    self.init()
}
}

When I create an instance of the Names enum I would think that the following should work:

var name = Names()

It doesn't though. Instead I need to explicitly assign a member value to the enum to use it properly:

var name = Names.Tom

Again, the question is if I really need to do it this way, or did I forget something, that was mentioned in the course videos?

miguelcastro2
miguelcastro2
Courses Plus Student 6,573 Points

Looking at this code, what do you expect your name variable to return? What value should it provide?

Dennis Parussini
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Dennis Parussini
Treehouse Project Reviewer

It shouldn't actually have a value at all. All I would like to do is to create an instance of the enum without giving it an initial value. I was thinking about this because you can do so with structs and classes.

miguelcastro2
miguelcastro2
Courses Plus Student 6,573 Points

Enums are just ways of organizing constants and in many cases you do not require any instances of them. I believe if you want the Enum to default to a value then you can set that value in your init() method, otherwise you would just reference the Enum statically. So if you wanted your instance to default to Tom it could look like this:

init() {
   self = .Tom
}
Dennis Parussini
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Dennis Parussini
Treehouse Project Reviewer

Ok, thanks for the info. That helped me a lot. :-)