How do I run Asynchronous callbacks in Playground

Question

Many Cocoa and CocoaTouch methods have completion callbacks implemented as blocks in Objective-C and Closures in Swift. However, when trying these out in Playground, the co

Answer 1

Swift 3, xcode 8, iOS 10

Notes:

Tell the compiler that the playground file requires "indefinite execution"

Manually terminate execution via a call to PlaygroundSupport.current.completeExecution() within your completion handler.

You may run into problems with the cache directory and to resolve this you will need to manually re-instantiate the UICache.shared singleton.

Example:

import UIKit
import Foundation
import PlaygroundSupport

// resolve path errors
URLCache.shared = URLCache(memoryCapacity: 0, diskCapacity: 0, diskPath: nil)

// identify that the current page requires "indefinite execution"
PlaygroundPage.current.needsIndefiniteExecution = true

// encapsulate execution completion
func completeExecution() {
    PlaygroundPage.current.finishExecution()
}

let url = URL(string: "http://i.imgur.com/aWkpX3W.png")

let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url!) { (data, response, error) in
    var image = UIImage(data: data!)

    // complete execution
    completeExecution()
}

task.resume()