Instantiate Swift class from string

The problem is still, how would I call the controller method? I still can't
instantiate a new instance of the controller and call a given method on the
instance.

I was able to partially get this working, but I realized that I still can't
instantiate a new controller on each request. I can't figure out a good way
to store the class method

*Matthew Davies*
Junior Developer, GeoStrategies <http://geostrategies.com>
Director of Photography, OffBlock Films <http://offblockfilms.com>
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On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Jeremy Pereira < jeremy.j.pereira@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 10 Dec 2015, at 20:22, Matthew Davies via swift-users < > swift-users@swift.org> wrote:
>
> I'm building a URL router in which I'd like to pass a controller and a
method. I don't want to instantiate all the controllers up front and pass
the methods in as closures, nor do I want old controller instances still
kept around. If there's a better way, I'm definitely open to any
suggestions. I'm still learning the "Swift" way to do things.

The way I would do this is to define my controller interface with a
protocol and then have a dictionary of the following type:

        [String: (Request) throws -> Controller]

where Controller is the protocol and Request is the HTTP request.

So you have a dictionary of URLs to functions (or closures) that create
instances that conform to the Controller protocol. The closure takes a
parameter of the HTTP request so it has the option of choosing the returned
instance based on the method or headers or parameters in the request.

In my implementation, I took the path part of the URL and if it was in the
dictionary it would use the returned closure to create the controller. If
it wasn’t there, I chopped off the last path part and tried again and so on
until I was left with “/“ which always maps to a controller.

The closure is allowed to throw so I could put something like this in for
a path

    { _ in throw HTTPError(404) }

which would be handled further up the call chain by generating a 404
response.