RealDealMeal 🍽️

Discover, explore, and save recipes powered by TheMealDB.

Overview

RealDealMeal helps you find cooking inspiration fast:

• Get a curated set of random recommended meals on the Home tab.
• Search meals by name with debounced results.
• Browse by meal category.
• View rich recipe details: image, ingredients (auto-composed), and step-by-step instructions.
• Save favorites locally (persisted with @AppStorage).
• Share recipes with the iOS share sheet.

Features

Area	Highlights
Home	Parallel fetching of unique random meals; pull to refresh button
Search	Debounced text search (cancels stale tasks), category filtering
Detail	Ingredient normalization (20 API fields → clean array), instruction step parsing
Favorites	Persistent JSON storage via @AppStorage, instant UI updates
Sharing	Native UIActivityViewController wrapper
Layout	Adaptive grids (2–3 columns) & responsive detail layout (compact vs wide)

Architecture

The app follows MVVM with a service layer.

View (SwiftUI)  -> observes  Published state on  ViewModel
ViewModel       -> orchestrates async calls via APIServiceType, transforms raw models
Service         -> fetch + decode (TheMealDB JSON) using async/await
Model           -> Codable structs + computed helpers (ingredients, steps)

Key Design Choices

• Random meal recommendations fetched concurrently with TaskGroup and early cancellation when enough unique results are collected.
• Debounced search leverages a cancelable Task + Task.sleep for a responsive typing experience without flooding the network.
• Ingredient list is synthesized at model level (Meal.ingredients) → keeps Views simple and consistent.
• Favorites stored as full Meal objects (not just IDs) for offline detail viewing of cached items.

Data Source

All recipe data comes from the public TheMealDB v1 API (https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/).

Requirements

• macOS with Xcode 16 or newer
• iOS 18 simulator or device (older may work)
• Network access

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository.
2. Open RealDealMeal.xcodeproj.
3. Select an iOS Simulator (e.g. iPhone 16 Pro) and press Run.

No API key setup required (TheMealDB free tier endpoints are used).

Project Structure (excerpt)

RealDealMeal/
 Models/          // Codable models + computed helpers
 Services/        // APIService (network + decoding)
 ViewModels/      // Home, Search/List, Favorites logic
 Views/           // SwiftUI screens & components

Author

Developed by Brent Vervaet. See the in‑app About screen or visit the portfolio link there.

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Happy cooking! 🍜