A model is now used to store all of the dining location information. This means that the data is now shared between all views, making it much easier to refresh and removing lots of excess API calls. dining-all is now called for the current day and the following 6 days on app launch and on refresh, but beyond that no additional API calls need to be made (excluding occupancy info). This means no more loading screens between views!
The window for hours in DetailView has been shifted to now show the current day and the next 6 days rather than the hours for each day in the current calendar week. This makes a lot more sense, because who cares what last Tuesday's hours were on Saturday, you'd rather know what's coming up in the next week.
The visiting chef screen now supports scrolling through 7 days of visiting chefs instead of just today and tomorrow.
Some basic frameworks laid for the visiting chef notification feature, however it does not work yet and is not exposed in the app.
Also fixed sorting and searching bugs introduced by changes in the previous commit.
Code that should've been fully async that was not previously actually async, such as the networking code, is now actually async. This makes it much easier to read and means that it makes a lot more sense in the context of the program. This also means that all uses of DispatchQueue.main.sync{} and DispatchQueue.main.async{} are now gone.
DetailView's fetching code benefitted the most from these changes, and is now just one iterative function instead of two cursed functions involving callbacks. As a result, you can now also pull down on the detail view to refresh the data, which is handy. Note that occupancy isn't updated when doing this currently due to a task issue I haven't figured out yet, but you can just go back out and in to update that anyway.
ContentView will also now automatically refresh the data if the last refreshed date is no longer today, so if you let the app sit in the background and then focus it, dates should automatically update to being for today.
The app was previously not checking if the current day of the week was within the list of weekdays that the regular opening schedule was valid for. This lead to the app frequently claiming a location was open on the weekend when it wasn't, which burned me personally several times. I've gone to like 4 locations this weekend under the assumption they were open because my own app said so, and finally I was like "hey maybe this isn't the data being bad and I've messed something up" and lo and behold, I did. Oops.
Also removes the middleman API call to get the MDO ID from the main location ID, as I realized the location info from TigerCenter actually includes the MDO ID already. This simplifies the code for getting the occupancy of a location by a good bit and just makes me happy.
This update mostly includes improvements related to sorting and filtering the main dining location list, including:
- Favorites! You can mark locations as your favorites by swiping them on the list or pressing the star button on their detail page. Favorites are sorted to the top.
- "Hide Closed Locations" has been moved to a dedicated sort/filter button in the bottom left corner. This looks best on iOS 26+, where it sits nicely to the left of the search bar.
- Added an "Open Locations First" option to sort open locations above closed locations, if you want to know what's open quicker without entirely hiding closed locations.
Other improvements:
- Made most asynchronous code properly async instead of bouncing between DispatchQueue.main.async{} and .sync{}.
- Added a timer to refresh open statuses every 3 seconds while on the main list, so that when the time changes the open statuses will change appropriately. It seemed silly to force you to fetch the data again just to do a quick "hey is current time in range?".
- Made date formatter shared so there aren't 3 separate copies of it.
The details page for a location now shows an indicator of how busy a location is based on data from the RIT maps API, which kindly offers the current and maximum occupancies for locations around campus. This is displayed the same way that the RIT website displays it, with 0-5 person icons that are filled in based on the percentage occupied the location is. This API can be *really* slow sometimes, so this data is fetched indepdently of the main load, because it could end up massively slowing down the app to not display the main info until after the occupancy data loads. A small spinner is used to indicate that occupancy data is loading, and the indicators are partially transparent until the data is loaded.
Also fixed a bug where locations with multiple opening periods could have exceptions for the same time period, resulting in duplicated time slots. Thanks Brick City Cafe! This is fixed by making sure that times are not already present in the openTimes/closeTimes arrays before adding them.
- Visiting chef screen now shows "No visiting chefs today" instead of nothing when there are, get this, no visiting chefs today
- 24-hour locations (Bytes) will no longer show as "Closing Soon" for the last 30 minutes of the day only to reset back to "Open" at midnight
- The app will now display a network error instead of loading indefinitely if an error occurs while fetching dining data
- Other minor spacing and layout changes
Reworked the detail view for locations to use the screen space more effectively and show the day's visiting chefs and daily specials, as well as the hours for the entire week.
The visiting chef screen has also been massively reworked to show all visiting chefs under what location they're in, with their times for the day and an indicator marking their status (one of: "Here Now", "Arriving Later", "Ariving Soon", "Leaving Soon", and "Left For Today"). These markers are also used in location's detail view. There's also an arrow in the top right that switches the visiting chef screen from today's visiting chefs to tomorrow's, so you can scout out what you might want to get tomorrow.
Locations are also now sorted alphabetically on the main menu, to make finding the location you're looking for easier.
The DetailView now presents information in a more appealing way, and also fetches the opening hours for the entire week, so you can see more than just the current day's hours for a location.
Also added preliminary support for parsing visiting chef information. Times are not being parsed yet because the formatting for them is super bad and inconsistent, but the names and descriptions are parsed. A "Today's Visiting Chefs" button has been added to the top of ContentView that brings you to a basic screen listing all of the locations with visiting chefs and telling you what they are. Currently times are presented as part of the name of the location like they are in the TigerCenter response data.
Separated types out into their own file to make them easier to keep track of, and described what they're all for better. Also removed unnecessary "Location" type used in ContentView to display data, because it was almost an exact duplicate of the type that it was being created from. Removing that removed a lot of pointless extra logic, and should make the processs of how it pulls and parses the data easier to understand.
Multiple open periods for one location are also now sorted, so that the earliest open time will be shown first. Some locations have them flipped in the response data, so they were backwards before.
