UIActivityIndicatorView not showing up when invoked from button action

Question

I\'m trying to show a spinner during a possibly lengthy action invoked by a button press, but I can\'t get it to show up. Here\'s my code:

class ViewController:          


        

Answer 1

What you want is something like:

@IBAction func buttonPressed(sender: UIBarButtonItem) {
  spinner.startAnimating()
  let dispatchPriority = DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT
  dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(dispatchPriority, 0)) { 

    NSThread.sleepForTimeInterval(5.0) //your task here instead of this line

    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), {
      self.spinner.stopAnimating()
    })
  }
}

This starts the spinner,then dispatches to a background thread, performs a task there (I'm assuming the task you are performing is one that can be performed on a background thread - i.e it doesn't involve UI stuff). Once the task is complete, the method dispatches back to the main UI thread, and stops the spinner.