Daemon to monitor activity - iphone

I am working on some kind of communication which might get interrupted once in a while. For this I need some kind of monitor that fires after 5 seconds, if not in the meantime has been reset by any valid communication to start waiting for another 5 seconds, and so on....
Thanks!

Take a look at the NSTimer class.

Related

Process Recodring before meeting is over in bigbluebutton

I have to process recording after every 10 minutes while the meeting is going on, so that I can get the recordings file immediately, I tried to change the bbb-record-core.timer value as shown in documentation but it is process after the meeting is ended.
I want to start processing as soon as recording starts or every ten minutes without ending the meeting, the recording will be going on and in background the process should start.
Is there anything that I can do, to achieve this.
Edit the bbb-record-core.timer file. Be default, this file is configured to run it every 30 seconds. You can use a new attribute called OnCalendar and use cron to set it up based on your requirements.
Here's a resource that helped me out.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bigbluebutton-dev/E4XJ6yB22eQ

Reachability hangs application

Currently i am following thread to check wheather my internet is active or not in my application, but as it is taking time to give the response ,so this will freeze my UI.
So is there any way to implement it without freezing UI(like NSOperation).
If the internet is indeed down, it takes time. It is limitation of Apple's API. We have to live with it or put a timer to cancel the operation after 30 secs or so. But if a genuine response especially via GPRS takes more than 30 secs, you will be canceling that too if you put timer condition.
Alternatively, you could check for internet status asynchronously and display an ActivityIndicator or similar in the main thread. This means that you create a new thread which will run parallel with your main thread (in your case, the GUI that are freezing).

Identifying server timeout quickly in iPhone

I am connecting my iPhone application to JBOSS server. When the JBoss server is down, the iPHone timesout while connecting. It takes lot of time to timeout. Is there a quick way to identify if my application server is down. I think Reachability example demoes if the server machine is down and not if the application server is down. ANy help or advise would be appreciated.
Lets generalize the problem, so that its easier to visualize the problem and its solution.
Suppose, Your App is the only app connected to the server. When it sends a query, it get a response. Now you can assume if the server is OK, you should be able to receive a response in 5 sec's but if the server is down you will never receive a response.
This assumption breaks down the problem into two variables, 5 and infinity but you dont want to wait till the end of time to receive an answer, so you introduce a timeout value. Let say 5 min's. Now your variables are 5 and 360 sec. All is good but you dont want to wait 5 min (360 sec) if the server is down but you do want to wait 30 or 60 sec's if the connection is slow.
What you need is a another service, which monitors your server every (5-360) / 2 sec. Now when you query your server, you can wait till (5-360) / 2 sec before sending out a quick query to the third party service to check if your server is up or down.
This way you can reduce the query time out by (5-360) / 2 + the time it takes for the third party to answer your query.
See the docs on how to create your NSURLRequest: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSURLRequest_Class/Reference/Reference.html
You can specify a timeout with requestWithUrl:cachePolicy:timeoutInterval:

iphone consume wcf once every minute

My app is able to consume a wcf using ASIHTTPRequest. But the thing is that i need to check the server hour every one minute. So i need a request to the server every one minute. What is more, sometime i will need to refresh the clock every one second.
the app is a items auction so i need to get the hour no matter what.
so my question is, is this going to kill the iphone?
ASIHTTPRequest have a method to achieve this? making calls every XX time?
some good way to do it?
Thx in advance!
Assuming the data you are getting back isn't larger than the memory threshold, and you are properly managing memory on your end, AND you are performing an asynchronous request (or a request on a background thread), this shouldn't kill the app memory-wise or cause it to hang.
I do something similar, where every 2 minutes I ping my server for updates. I achieve this using an NSURLConnection and NSURLRequest, though I imagine ASIHTTPRequest is not much different. I typically use a recurring timer that, when invoked, calls a method which, using Grand Central Dispatch, sets up my request/connection and fires.

Send Network Message When iPhone Application is Closed

My iPhone application supports a proprietary network protocol using the CocoaAsyncSocket library. I need to be able to send a network message out when my iPhone application is closed. The code that sends the message is getting called from the app delegate, but the application shuts down before the message actually goes out. Is there a way to keep the application alive long enough for the message to go out?
Bruce
The docs from Apple don't specifically state this, but the sense I get from looking around the Web and from personal experience is that you have about 4 to 5 seconds after the user hits the Home button to shut your app before your application actually terminates. The iPhone OS is controlling this so you can't block the termination to allow your program to finish first. Basically when your time is up, your program is killed.
There may be another solution, though. First I'd confirm that your code is really taking more than 5 seconds to run. Perhaps you can have it run in response to a button tap, and time how long it runs. If it is more than 5 seconds, you probably are running into this time out issue.
You might then find a way to trigger a message to be sent from a server that is always running. You should have enough time to trigger a remote action, which in turn could then take as long as it needs to run.
Or perhaps you could save the vital information to the iPhone file system on exit, and send that message the next time someone starts the application, which should theoretically give you enough time.
Hope this helps!
I assume you're already calling it from your AppDelegate's:
- (void)applicationWillTerminate:(UIApplication *)application
But as you've discovered there's no guarantee it'll be called or will be allowed to finish. There are a few options that may or may not work depending on what you're trying to do:
If you need the server to perform some sort of cleaning operation triggered by when the client app is gone then you could try watching for TCP socket closure on the server and treating that as the triggering event. But if you explicitly need to send data back with the closure this may not work.
If the data you're sending back is not time-sensitive then you can do like most of the analytics libraries do and cache the data (along with a uuid) on the client then try to send it on app closure. If it goes through, you can clear the cache (or do it the next time the app is run). If it doesn't, it's saved and you can send out when the app is run next. On the server, you would use the uuid to avoid duplicate requests.
If the material is time-sensitive then your best bet is to implement heartbeat and send periodic updated values to the server. Then when the client app dies the server times out the heartbeat and can use the last received value as the final closing point of data.
In either case, if an explicit closure event is required by your custom protocol then you may want to reconsider using it in a real-life mobile environment where things have to be much more fluid and tolerant of failure.
As others have noted, there's no way to be absolutely certain that you'll be able to send this, but there are approaches to help.
As Ken notes, you do in practice get a few seconds between "willTerminate" and forced termination, so there generally is time to do what you need.
A problem you're almost certainly running into is with CocoaAsyncSocket. When you get the "willTerminate" message, you're on the last run loop of the main thread. So if you block the main thread, and CocoaAsyncSocket is running on the main thread, it'll never get processed. As I recall, CocoaAsyncSocket won't actually send all the data until the next event loop.
One approach, therefore, is to keep pumping the event loop yourself:
- (void)applicationWillTerminate:(UIApplication *)application
{
// ...Send your message with CocoaAsyncSocket...
while (! ...test to see if it sent...)
{
[[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] runMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate:[NSDate distantFuture]];
}
}
I've also looked at putting this work onto a background thread and letting the main thread terminate, in theory letting us go back to Springboard while continuing to run for a few seconds. It's not immediately clear to me whether this will work properly using NSThread (which are detached). Using POSIX threads (which are joinable by default) may work, but probably circumvents any advantages of the background thread. Anyway, it's something to look at if useful. In my apps, we've used the "post next time we launch" approach, since that always works (even if you crash).