SwiftAirmen: FAA Airman Database parser

SwiftAirmen parses the FAA Airmen Certification Database into native Swift structs that are tightly defined with no data weirdness. You must download a copy of the airmen database in CSV format from that website to use with this library.

Requirements

This library was built for use with Swift 5.5 or newer on any platform or architecture.

Installation

Use Swift Package Manager to include SwiftAirmen in your project:

let package = Package(
    // [...]
    dependencies: [
        .package(url: "https://github.com/RISCfuture/SwiftAirmen", branch: "main")
    ],
    // [...]
)

Be sure to include SwiftAirmen as a dependency in your .target entry.

Usage

To download and unzip airmen records in CSV format, create an instance of Downloader:

import SwiftAirmen

let downloader = SwiftAirmen.Downloader()
let directoryURL = try await downloader.download()

Downloader supports both traditional callback-style syntax as well as async syntax. See the class documentation for more examples.

To parse airmen records, create an instance of Parser and give it the path to your downloaded CSV records:

let parser = SwiftAirmen.Parser(directory: directoryURL)
let airmen = try await parser.parse(errorCallback: { error in
  // your error handler here
})

parse executes asynchronously and returns a dictionary mapping airman unique IDs to the Airman record for that airman. Any parsing errors that occur are given to you via errorCallback. The row is skipped but parsing is not aborted.

Parser supports traditional callback-style syntax, Combine publisher syntax, and async syntax. See the class documentation for more examples.

An Airman record contains information about the airman and their certificates:

let airman = airmen["A4760216"]
print(airman.firstName)
for cert in airman.certificates {
    guard case let .pilot(level, ratings, centerlineThrust) = cert else { continue }
    if level == .airlineTransport {
        // your code continues
    }
}

To simplify debugging, the Airman class implements debugDescription, and the Certificate enum (and its various associated classes) implements description. These can be used to print English descriptions of an Airman or their certificates/ratings.

Parsing is an expensive operation. See the Parser class for methods that will allow you to parse a subset of the airmen certification data.

Documentation

Online API and tutorial documentation is available at https://riscfuture.github.io/SwiftAirmen/documentation/swiftairmen/

DocC documentation is available, including tutorials and API documentation. For Xcode documentation, you can run

swift package generate-documentation --target SwiftAirmen

to generate a docarchive at .build/plugins/Swift-DocC/outputs/SwiftAirmen.doccarchive. You can open this docarchive file in Xcode for browseable API documentation. Or, within Xcode, open the SwiftAirmen package in Xcode and choose Build Documentation from the Product menu.