How do you document the parameters of a function's closure parameter in Swift 3?

Søren Mortensen picture Søren Mortensen · Jul 30, 2016 · Viewed 12.6k times · Source

In Xcode 8 beta and Swift 3, when you have a method that takes a closure as a parameter, for example:

func foo(bar: (String) -> Void) {
    bar("Hello, world")
}

How do you document the parameters the closure takes? For example, if I wrote this:

/// Calls bar with "Hello, world"
/// - parameter bar: A closure to call
func foo(bar: (String) -> Void) {
    bar("Hello, world")
}

Then the quick help looks like this:

foo(bar:) Quick Help

I would like to know what the syntax is that will allow me to write some text to replace "No description." Many thanks!

Answer

Tim Vermeulen picture Tim Vermeulen · Jul 30, 2016

As far as I know, you can only document the closure parameters if you label them:

/// Calls bar with "Hello, world"
/// - parameter bar: A closure to call
/// - parameter theString: A string to use
func foo(bar: (theString: String) -> Void) {
    bar(theString: "Hello, world")
}

This is less than ideal: it forces you to use an argument label when you call the closure, and if there are naming conflicts, there seems no way to distinguish between the two.

Edit: As @Arnaud pointed out, you can use _ to prevent having to use the parameter label when calling the closure:

/// Calls bar with "Hello, world"
/// - parameter bar: A closure to call
/// - parameter theString: A string to use
func foo(bar: (_ theString: String) -> Void) {
    bar("Hello, world")
}

In fact, this is the only valid approach in Swift 3 because parameter labels are no longer part of the type system (see SE-0111).