Conforming to Hashable protocol?

Question

I'm trying to make a dictionary with the key as a struct I've created and the value as an array of Ints. However, I keep getting the error:

Type 'DateStruct' does not conform to protocol 'Hashable'

I'm pretty sure I've implemented the necessary methods but for some reason it still doesn't work.

Here's my struct with the implemented protocols:

struct DateStruct {
    var year: Int
    var month: Int
    var day: Int

    var hashValue: Int {
        return (year+month+day).hashValue
    }

    static func == (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
        return lhs.hashValue == rhs.hashValue
    }

    static func < (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
        if (lhs.year < rhs.year) {
            return true
        } else if (lhs.year > rhs.year) {
            return false
        } else {
            if (lhs.month < rhs.month) {
                return true
            } else if (lhs.month > rhs.month) {
                return false
            } else {
                if (lhs.day < rhs.day) {
                    return true
                } else {
                    return false
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Can anybody please explain to me why I'm still getting the error?

Answer 1

You're missing the declaration:

struct DateStruct: Hashable {

And your == function is wrong. You should compare the three properties.

static func == (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
    return lhs.year == rhs.year && lhs.month == rhs.month && lhs.day == rhs.day
}

It's possible for two different values to have the same hash value.

Answer 2

If you don't want to use the hashValue, you can combine the hash of your values with the hash(into:) method.

For more information see the answer : https://stackoverflow.com/a/55118328/1261547

Answer 3

Btw

var hashValue: Int 

is obsolete (except in the legacy NSObject inheritance trees).

    func hash(into hasher: inout Hasher)
    {
        hasher.combine(year);
        hasher.combine(month) 
    ...

is the new way

Answer 4

If the class has fields of type (another class), that class should adopt Hashable.

example

struct Project : Hashable {
    var activities: [Activity]?

}

Here, Activity class must adopt Hashable too.

Answer 5

You did not specified the Hashable protocol when defining struct:

struct DateStruct: Hashable { ...

The following code is from your example and it runs on a Playground. Please note that your == operator has been modified here:

import Foundation

struct DateStruct: Hashable {
    var year: Int
    var month: Int
    var day: Int

    var hashValue: Int {
        return (year+month+day).hashValue
    }

    static func == (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
        return lhs.year == rhs.year && lhs.month == rhs.month && lhs.day == rhs.day
    }

    static func < (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
        if (lhs.year < rhs.year) {
            return true
        } else if (lhs.year > rhs.year) {
            return false
        } else {
            if (lhs.month < rhs.month) {
                return true
            } else if (lhs.month > rhs.month) {
                return false
            } else {
                if (lhs.day < rhs.day) {
                    return true
                } else {
                    return false
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

var d0 = DateStruct(year: 2017, month: 2, day: 21)
var d1 = DateStruct(year: 2017, month: 2, day: 21)

var dates = [DateStruct:Int]()
dates[d0] = 23
dates[d1] = 49

print(dates)

print(d0 == d1) // true

d0.year = 2018

print(d0 == d1) // false

Answer 6

For simple structs, where all its properties are already Hashable (i.e. Int, String, ... ), we can conform to Hashable just declaring it (see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/hashable )

So no need to implement hashValue (which btw is deprecated) nor == (because Hashable conforms to Equatable).

And since we're implementing the < operator, then it'd make sense to conform to Comparable, so we can sort (i.e. [dateStructA, dateStructB, ...].sorted()).

So I'd do it like:

struct DateStruct: Comparable & Hashable {
    let year: Int
    let month: Int
    let day: Int

    static func < (lhs: DateStruct, rhs: DateStruct) -> Bool {
        if lhs.year != rhs.year {
           return lhs.year < rhs.year
        } else if lhs.month != rhs.month {
           return lhs.month < rhs.month
        } else {
           return lhs.day < rhs.day
        }
    }
}