How do I cancel an NSOperation's dependencies?

Question

I have some NSOperations in a dependency graph:

NSOperation *op1 = ...;
NSOperation *op2 = ...;

[op2 addDependency:op1];

Here's how I'm running them:

NSOperationQueue *queue = [[NSOperationQueue alloc] init];
[queue addOperation:op1];
[queue addOperation:op2];

Now I need to cancel them. How do I ensure that all the NSOperations in a dependency graph are cancelled, and that no other NSOperations are cancelled?

---

what I've tried:

Calling cancel on either NSOperation doesn't cancel the other (as far as I can tell):

[op1 cancel]; // doesn't cancel op2
// -- or --
[op2 cancel]; // doesn't cancel op1

Cancelling the queue would also cancel operations that aren't part of the dependency graph of op1 and op2 (if there are any such operations in the queue):

[queue cancelAllOperations];

So I solved this using a custom method that recursively looks through an NSOperation's dependencies and cancels them. However, I'm not happy with this solution because I feel like I'm fighting the framework:

- (void)recursiveCancel:(NSOperation *)op
{
    [op cancel];
    for (NSOperation *dep in op.dependencies)
    {
        [self recursiveCancel:op];
    }
}

Answer 1

Sounds to me like you are trying to group operations together in the same queue. To achieve that it's best to split them up using a queue per group. So for each group create an NSOperation subclass in concurrent mode, include a queue, add each sub-operation to the queue. Override cancel and call [super cancel] then [self.queue cancelAllOperations].

A huge advantage of this approach is you can retry operations by adding again to the sub-queue, without affecting the order of the main queue.