Reflection in Swift

Hello, In this blog we are going to learn about reflection in swift. Reflection in swift uses Mirror API to inspect and manipulate properties at runtime. Its functionality in swift is more limited in comparison to other programming languages.

Mirror API contains a few properties via which we can access the properties of a type. Below is the example of Reflection in Swift.

In the above example, you can see that we have created an object of structure type and passed it to the Mirror API. Then in the next line, we are using children property to fetch all the properties of the structure A and printing them. The children property returns an array of tuple which contains 2 values. The first is label which is of optional String type and returns the name of the property and the second is value which is Any type and returns the value of the property.

Properties

The mirror API contains a few more properties which are explained below.

• superclassMirror: It returns the Mirror object of superclass if available.
• displayStyle: It returns the DisplayStatus of the objects. Few example of this are class, enum, tuple, optional, collection, etc
• subjectType: It returns the type of the object.
• children: It returns the array of tuple which contains properties and its corresponding values.

Reflection With Class

The mirror API works same with class type objects. Below is an example illustrating this.

Thank you for reading this article. After that, if you want to read more articles regarding iOS Development click here or if you want to read more about Mirror API click here.