I have a ton of repeating code in my class that looks like the following:
NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request
delegate:self];
The problem with asynchronous requests is when you have various requests going off, and you have a delegate assigned to treat them all as one entity, a lot of branching and ugly code begins to formulate going:
What kind of data are we getting back? If it contains this, do that, else do other. It would be useful I think to be able to tag these asynchronous requests, kind of like you're able to tag views with IDs.
I was curious what strategy is most efficient for managing a class that handles multiple asynchronous requests.
I track responses in an CFMutableDictionaryRef keyed by the NSURLConnection associated with it. i.e.:
connectionToInfoMapping =
CFDictionaryCreateMutable(
kCFAllocatorDefault,
0,
&kCFTypeDictionaryKeyCallBacks,
&kCFTypeDictionaryValueCallBacks);
It may seem odd to use this instead of NSMutableDictionary but I do it because this CFDictionary only retains its keys (the NSURLConnection) whereas NSDictionary copies its keys (and NSURLConnection doesn't support copying).
Once that's done:
CFDictionaryAddValue(
connectionToInfoMapping,
connection,
[NSMutableDictionary
dictionaryWithObject:[NSMutableData data]
forKey:@"receivedData"]);
and now I have an "info" dictionary of data for each connection that I can use to track information about the connection and the "info" dictionary already contains a mutable data object that I can use to store the reply data as it comes in.
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data
{
NSMutableDictionary *connectionInfo =
CFDictionaryGetValue(connectionToInfoMapping, connection);
[[connectionInfo objectForKey:@"receivedData"] appendData:data];
}