Property observers: didSet

There's one last thing to cover before this project is done, and it's both small and easy: property observers. You learned about these when we looked at the fundamentals of Swift, but now it’s time to put them into action.

Right now we have a property called score that is set to 0 when the game is created and increments by one whenever an answer is found. But we don't do anything with that score, so our score label is never updated.

One solution to this problem is to use something like scoreLabel.text = "Score: \(score)" whenever the score value is changed, and that's perfectly fine to begin with. But what happens if you're changing the score from several places? You need to keep all the code synchronized, which is unpleasant.

Swift’s solution is property observers, which let you execute code whenever a property has changed. To make them work, we use either didSet to execute code when a property has just been set, or willSet to execute code before a property has been set.

In our case, we want to add a property observer to our score property so that we update the score label whenever the score value was changed. So, change your score property to this:

var score = 0 {
    didSet {
        scoreLabel.text = "Score: \(score)"
    }
}

Using this method, any time score is changed by anyone, our score label will be updated. That's it, the project is done!

Sponsor Hacking with Swift and reach the world's largest Swift community!