I am having a problem tracking the download progress for ASIFormDataRequest.
I can easily get the upload progress but not the download.
In the example on the ASIHTTPRequest site they use ASIHTTPRequest to show download progress.
So is it possible to get the download progress for the ASIFormDataRequest?
I already checked if I get the Content-Length response from the server, dunno what else I am doing wrong.
My setup.
ASIFormDataRequest *request = [ASIFormDataRequest requestWithURL:url];
request.downloadProgressDelegate = progressIndicator;
[request setShouldAttemptPersistentConnection:NO];
[self performSelectorOnMainThread:#selector(showProgress:) withObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:0] waitUntilDone:NO];
[request startSynchronous];
The problem with the download progress for ASIFormDataRequest was that I didn't take into consideration the time server is processing the request.
When the ASIFormDataRequest reaches the server it waits until the server responds with the data. If you have to wait for server to perform some kind of calculation this period may take some time.
In my case the upload was super fast as well as the download, hence I could not see the progress, it was always 0 to 100%. The only process that was long and that got me confused was the calculation process the server was performing which in my case is undeterministic.
In short, all was working well, except my understanding... It happens all the time :-)
Related
I have an iOS 5 app that uses NSURLConnection to load some XML via GET. On very rare occasions connections appear to get stuck in a condition where they timeout repeatedly.
An example request:
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init];
[request setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];
/*
The request is set with a timeout interval of 10 because (due to the nature of
the app and the XML feed) this data is reloaded every 15 seconds.
*/
[request setTimeoutInterval:10];
[request setCachePolicy:NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringCacheData];
[request setHTTPMethod:#"GET"];
self.afOperation = [[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request];
self.afOperation.successCallbackQueue = dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND,0);
self.afOperation.failureCallbackQueue = dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND,0);
//snip success/completion block code
[self.afOperation start];
So far I've seen three "recovery" scenarios when the requests begin to hang.
Quit the entire app
Plug the device into a computer (yes, really). Right after the iPhone/iPad acknowledges the connection it will immediately stop timing out.
Leave the app and go do something else for awhile. Quickly leaving and reentering the app is typically insufficient to cause recovery.
As you might imagine, I find this incredibly bizarre. At this time I've replaced my own NSURLConnectionDelegate implementation with AFNetworking (as seen above) and am still running into the same problem. I've added logging to every NSURLConnectionDelegate protocol selector and found that the only selector called (after calling start) is connection:didFailWithError:. I've ensured I'm not piling up multiple requests (the previous request is always canceled and nil'd before starting a new one). Additionally, I've verified that no request is actually being sent via tcpdump on my router. What could cause this type of behavior?
It turns out this problem is caused by the TestFlight SDK v1.0 and below. See Why does NSURLConnection fail to reach the backend?
Until they release a fix there's no way to workaround the problem short of stripping out the SDK entirely.
I started seeing the error after installing the testflight sdk, and removing it helped me get rid of it. However, I think it's caused by the interaction between Testflight and ASIHttpRequest (or whichever rest kit you use). It can also be possibly resolved by the following the solution in the link below (disabling compiler optimization on your ASIHttpRequest and ASIFormDataRequest files in your build phases)
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/asihttprequest/fw7PDcD2wKI%5B1-25%5D
Most of the time I end up in failMethod, I get the message Request timed out and a whole lot of jargon in the error. Why is this? Is there a solution for it?
I am using ASIHTTPRequest
[self setNetworkQueue:[ASINetworkQueue queue]];
[[self networkQueue] setDelegate:self];
[[self networkQueue] setShouldCancelAllRequestsOnFailure:NO];
[[self networkQueue] setRequestDidFinishSelector:#selector(successMethod:)];
[[self networkQueue] setRequestDidFailSelector:#selector(failMethod:)];
ASIHTTPRequest *r = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://www.example.com/wenb"]];
[r setUseKeychainPersistence:YES];
[[self networkQueue] addOperation:r];
[[self networkQueue] go];
Request timed out generally means what it says: that the server you're trying to get data from took too long to respond, and your request was terminated (I assume the URL you've posted isn't the URL you're trying to reach).
There are two solutions: preferably, figure out why your requests are taking so long to complete, because ASIHTTPRequest has a 10 second time out as default, which is quite long. The other, easier, option is to increase the timeout to, say, 30 seconds, which you can do like this:
[ASIHTTPRequest setDefaultTimeOutSeconds:30]
Perhaps try running your requests through something other than the phone to see how long they take, and to get more visibility on what the problem is.
For me this is depends on the mobile carriers. I got the same issue and I have tested on different carrier network using same application. It seems to me the network providers are using different type of connectivity (proxies). When you look at your phone logs, you can see same error from you mail client too. The one solution is, use the simple NSURLConnection with HTTP methods.
I have an app that makes moderate use of NSURLConnection. These async calls eventually finish and release properly (it looks like), but sometimes it takes some time for them to finish.
So, there are times when I exit the app, (note, not just sending it the background), that some of these connections are still active. If I immediately restart the app, the app freezes on startup. (didFinishLaunchingWithOptions never seems to get called).
While I'm not certain these connections are the issue, it would probably be good to terminate or cancel any remaining. Any suggestions on how to do this?
Bonus points on how to debug the restart also. (I'm already saving NSLog statements to a downloadable file)
You can cancel any NSURLConnection by sending it a cancel command.
[connection cancel];
From Apple docs
Cancels an asynchronous load of a
request. Once this method is called,
the receiver’s delegate will no longer
receive any messages for this
NSURLConnection.
Your start up issue could be related but hard to tell without knowing what type of data you're downloading and how you are using it.
Make sure you are calling release on the connection. Maybe it doesn't call shutdown or close on the socket until the last reference is dropped. I do something like this with no issues with references.
NSURLRequest *request = [[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url];
NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self];
[connection release];
[request release];
For cancel last request : [NSURLConnection cancelPreviousPerformRequestsWithTarget:self];
For cancel any specific request : [request cancel];
Note: Here request is the instance of NSURLConnection
I would like to start a server request, you can cancel.
My idea is to start the request in a thread so that the user interface does not freeze. So you can kill the whole thread including the request with a click on a "Cancel"-button.
With Android it works: the server request gets started in a "AsyncTask" and in the "onReturn()"-method I can react as soon as the server request finish.
How can I implement this using Objective-C on iOS?
My first attempt was a "NSInvocationOperation". You can cancel the operation, but it's difficult to handle when a request is completed and results are available. I think NSInvocationOperation is not the solution for my issue.
The would you recommend to me? Is NSThread the right choice for me?
Thank you very much!
Note!
This extremely old answer is now here only for historic purposes.
The wonderful ASIHttpRequest library no longer exists; technology is totally different now.
It is unbelievably simple to do this with ASIHttpRequest.
(Asynchronous is so simple, there is no reason you would ever do it not-asynchronously.)
Here are some rough extracts that might get you started.
...
ASIFormDataRequest *request;
...
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:#"https://blah.blah/blah.cgi?blah"];
request = [ASIFormDataRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setPostValue:#"fred" forKey:#"username"];
[request setPostValue:#"flint" forKey:#"passie"];
[request setPostValue:#"stone" forKey:#"town"];
// send up data...
[request setData:[NSData dataWithBytes:blah length:blah] forKey:#"thefile"];
// or perhaps something like...
[request setData:imageData withFileName:#"blah.png"
andContentType:#"image/jpeg" forKey:#"photoimage"];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request setDidFinishSelector:#selector(postingDone:)];
[request setDidFailSelector:#selector(postingDoneProblem:)];
[request startAsynchronous];
...
-(void) postingDone:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
// it worked
}
-(void) postingDoneProblem:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
// failed
}
Couldn't really be any easier. You're basically just typing out the fields and values.
Per your question, here is how you cancel an "in-flight" request... just set the delegate to nil and then "cancel" it.
[myRequest setDelegate:nil];
[myRequest cancel];
[myRequest release];
ASIHttpRequest is the "miracle library". If you are new to iOS, ASIHttpRequest is simply THE most used 3rd party library. Essentially, every single iPhone app of the 300,000 iPhone apps uses it.
If at all possible BE SURE to donate a few bucks to the guy -- if he stops supporting that library, 100,000 iPhone programmers are buggered!
the documentation is trivial, a child can follow it:
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/How-to-use
"Creating an asynchronous request"
it is probably - almost certainly - the most amazingly simple networking library on any platform. It is trivial to do what you describe, happily. Enjoy.
NSURLConnection is async by default and supports cancelation as well as delegate methods when connection has been established, data has been received or whole request has been completed.
Also data transfer takes place in background so that UI stays responsive.
Cocoa's built-in async networking code is not thread-based but works with run loop events, but the result (asynchronous connections) is the same.
Create an NSURLConnection with +[NSURLConnection connectionWithRequest:delegate:]. The delegate you set will be informed about the progress of the connection and can cancel it anytime with -[NSURLConnection cancel].
Check out ASIHTTPRequest, specifically, the ASINetworkQueue subclass, which is described as:
ASINetworkQueue
A subclass of NSOperationQueue that
may be used to track progress across
multiple requests.
I've only used ASIHTTPRequest for a single synchronous request to download directly to disk, which was easy to implement, but I've heard good reports of using queues to manage multiple asynchronous server requests at once.
One thing to note on the recommendations to use +[NSURLConnection connectionWithRequest:delegate:] is that it should only be called from the main thread as of iOS 4.
see http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/coding/ios4-issue-nsurlconnection-and-nsoperation/ for an example of how to deal with this.
I have an app that allows you to take a picture, adjust the jpeg quality size (10-100%) and then send it to a server using ASIFormDataRequest (part of the ASIHTTPRequest implementation). This works fine over a network connection, but over the celluar network it appears to sit there for 5-10 minutes attempting to transmit the image post data, before failing (even with the quality at 10%).
On comparing this to the image uploads that the Twitter and Facebook apps provide (which take ~30 seconds to a minute) this isn't exactly ideal. I wondered if anyone could give me any advice about either how to speed up my data transfer, or monitor it so I can see exactly where the problem lies.
Once I get back to my mac laptop tonight I'll post a code snippet of exactly what it is I'm doing, in case that helps.
EDIT: Heres the code snippet:
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:#"...upload.php"];
ASIFormDataRequest *request = [ASIFormDataRequest requestWithURL:url];
NSTimeInterval time = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970];
NSString *fileName = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%d", time];
...
float compressionRate = [userAccountView getCompressionRate];
NSLog(#"Compression rate: %.1f", compressionRate);
NSData *imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(imageForView, compressionRate);
[request setData:imageData withFileName:fileName andContentType:#"image/jpeg" forKey:#"userfile"];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request startAsynchronous];
The .. code comment is where I just stick an 'uploading' image over the view. I suppose I could make the call synchronous as opposed to asynchronous, do you think that may improve performance? I have left it that way in case at a later stage I wanted to allow the user to do other bits while it is uploading.
Any advice would be great :)
Thanks,
Dan
EDIT:
Jesse, thanks for the comment - I added in [request setUploadProcessDelegate:self] and put in the required method to monitor the data that was being sent, and it all seemed to be sending okay.
JosephH - I have added in "[ASIHTTPRequest setShouldThrottleBandwidthForWWAN:YES]" as suggested, and have also added "set_time_limit(0);" into the PHP upload script (in case of timeouts) and now the data does seem to be sending and being retrieved over the cellular network, so horray! Am playing around now with file compressions etc. to find the best one for the best quality. ATM it seems like 0.3 is pretty good quality, and transfers in roughly 30 seconds or so, which is what I was looking for!
I was also incorrectly setting the compression rate, as I was using 10-100 as opposed to 0.0-1.0, so I have also corrected that.
Thanks for your quick help guys in solving my issue!!
I think the first thing to do is to check what size the data you're sending is:
NSLog(#"imageData size = %d", [imageData length]);
Does your NSLog correctly show the compressionRate is set to 0.1 for 10%?
ASIHTTPRequest also has a lot of debug logging you can enable - see ASIHTTPRequestConfig.h; just change everything from 0 to 1. It may not reveal anything of interest, but it is certainly worth looking at.
Are you calling [ASIHTTPRequest setShouldThrottleBandwidthForWWAN:YES] ?
When it fails, how does it fail, what is the error, what does any logging on the server show?
(If you find out anything extra, please do edit it into the question and post a comment and I'll take another look)