How to use BehaviorRelay as an alternate to Variable in RxSwift?

Question

As of RxSwift4, Variable is moved to Deprecated.swift marking the possible deprecation of Variable in future. An alternate proposed to

Answer 1

I created those this extension, with two methods to facilitate migration in case you have a Variable of Array and you have to use append.

    extension BehaviorRelay where Element: RangeReplaceableCollection {

        func append(_ subElement: Element.Element) {
            var newValue = value
            newValue.append(subElement)
            accept(newValue)
        }

        func append(contentsOf: [Element.Element]) {
            var newValue = value
            newValue.append(contentsOf: contentsOf)
            accept(newValue)
        }

        public func remove(at index: Element.Index) {
            var newValue = value
            newValue.remove(at: index)
            accept(newValue)
        }

        public func removeAll() {
            var newValue = value
            newValue.removeAll()
            accept(newValue)
        }

    }

and you call it like this

    var things = BehaviorRelay<[String]>(value: [])
    things.append("aa")
    let otherThings = ["bb", "cc"]
    things.append(contentsOf: otherThings) 
    things.remove(at: 0)
    things.removeAll()