Can I use blocks in asynchronous results with restkit?

Question

--UPDATE: I've decided to give AFNetworking a try. Even though RestKit has a really nice object mapping functionality, the way the networking calls were designed have made some things difficult for us.

I'm hoping for some advice on how to organize my project that's using RestKit.

I have several REST calls from a repository class and its results get passed to controllers. For example I have a getProfile method in the repository class that is getting called from our browse view controller. The view controller is set as the delegate to the get profile calls while the repository class is set to the delegate for the restkit calls.

The problem is if the browse controller makes several get profile requests, it is difficult to distinguish which result should go to which delegate function since all the restkit calls share the same delegate method objectLoaderDidFinishLoading. I then have 4 delegates that I have to match the results of the 4 asynchronous restkit requests.

Is there any way I can use blocks so that I can pass a function to execute as the asnynrhounous result comes back so that I can assign a proper delegate? The block support that I saw allowed a block to be used before the request was sent out in rest kit but I am interested in using it for when the asynchronous result is returned.

The alternative of examining the results or setting user data and sleuthing what delegate goes with what asynchronous results seems unreliable and bulky.

Answer 1

You can solve your issues with disambiguating between your profile requests by using the userData opaque pointer on RKObjectLoader. That will allow you to hang any object you want on the request, which can then be used to help distinguish between multiple profile requests. Also, if those profile requests are going to different resourcePaths then you can just use the wasSentToResourcePath: method on RKObjectLoader to distinguish between them.