How do I start an Asynchronous NSURLConnection inside an NSOperation?

Question

I want to do an Asynchrous NSURLConnection inside of an NSOperation on a background thread. it is because I\'m doing some very expensive operations on the data as they come

Answer 1

I know this post is over a year old, but I wanted to add some suggestions for people who may run the same problem trying to create own async network operation. You need to add runloop to operation that runs in background and you should stop it when the operations has finished.

There actually 2 simple options:

Option 1 - using NSRunLoop

NSPort *port        = [NSPort port];
NSRunLoop *runLoop  = [NSRunLoop currentRunLoop];
[runLoop addPort:port forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];
[self.connection scheduleInRunLoop:runLoop forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];
[self.connection start];
[runLoop run];

and you need to stop when the operation is finished:

NSRunLoop *runLoop = [NSRunLoop currentRunLoop];
NSDate *date       = [NSDate distantFuture];
while (!runLoopIsStopped && [runLoop runMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate:date]);

Option 2 - using CF

You need to add

CFRunLoopRun();

when you start operation

and call

CFRunLoopStop(CFRunLoopGetCurrent());

when you finish operation.

Read the following post: CFRunLoopRun() vs [NSRunLoop run]