Do NSURLConnections belong in my model or controller?

Question

Say I'm using a JSON or XML API to get data about my projects from a URL using an asyncronous NSURLConnection, parsing that into an NSMutableArray and then populating an NSTableView.

I have a model: Project I have a controller: TableViewController (acting as table data source and delegate)

Where should I put the code that starts the request and parses the result into a NSMutableArray.

Should I have:

1:

A method inside Project called -(NSMutableArray* ) getAllProjects and call this from my Controller.

Or 2:

Should I enumerate an NSMutableArray of Project* objects, called for instance ProjectsArray* inside my Controller; each time calling [[Project alloc] init]?

Option 1 makes much more sense to me because I might want to get all the projects from multiple controllers and this would save repeating code, I only need to call a public method inside my Project model. In this case would I be doing lots of [[self alloc] init] statements? Is this ok? Also my model would need to be an NSURLConnection delegate. Is this correct?

Answer 1

No doubt it must be in your Model.

Reason :

Because you will be requiring to update it many times from different controllers, you can use KVO for that in future.

Answer 2

From my experience, I think the good way is to have the parsing routines in the model (ProjectsArray) and connection stuff in another class, which initiates the connection and returns raw NSData (through a delegate for example), which you pass to the model to parse it. This way your model or viewController won't have multiple roles.

As for calling [[Project alloc] init] each time you need the data—you can use static reference in the model class and then getting it by something like - (ProjectsArray *)instance