NSURLConnection methods no more available in IOS5

Question

NSURLConnectionDelegate has become a formal protocol (it was an informal protocol in previous versions). In this protocol, the following (non-deprecated) methods are declared:

• connection:didFailWithError:
• connectionShouldUseCredentialStorage:
• connection:willSendRequestForAuthenticationChallenge:

Furthermore, there are two subprotocols that conform to NSURLConnectionDelegate:

NSURLConnectionDataDelegate is used for delegates that load data to memory, and declares the following methods, some of which I’m sure you’ll find familiar:

• connection:willSendRequest:redirectResponse:
• connection:didReceiveResponse:
• connection:didReceiveData:
• connection:needNewBodyStream:
• connection:didSendBodyData:totalBytesWritten:totalBytesExpectedToWrite:
• connection:willCacheResponse:
• connectionDidFinishLoading:

NSURLConnectionDownloadDelegate is used for delegates that store data directly to a disk file, and declares the following methods:

• connection:didWriteData:totalBytesWritten:expectedTotalBytes:
• connectionDidResumeDownloading:totalBytesWritten:expectedTotalBytes:
• connectionDidFinishDownloading:destinationURL:

As you can see, you can still use your previous delegates, possibly with some minor modifications.

For more information, see the iOS 4.3 to iOS 5.0 API Differences document and NSURLConnection.h in your local Xcode installation. When a new SDK version is released, it’s not uncommon for the documentation inside the header files to be more reliable than the documentation available on the developer library. It takes a while for the latter to be up-to-date.

I just encountered this same issue. Looks like sending an asynchronous request is more simplified with blocks and NSOperationQueue.

+ (void)sendAsynchronousRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request queue:(NSOperationQueue *)queue completionHandler:(void (^)(NSURLResponse*, NSData*, NSError*))handler

This means that the delegate is now only used for authentication and failure issues.

NO! They are NOT limited to use for authentication and failure issues if you look carefully through the Apple's library.

Since introducing +(void)sendAsynchronousRequest:queue:completionHandler: to NSConnection class object, Many things which can perform as many NSConnectionDelegate method as before can now be used in formal protocols called "NSConnectionDataDelegate" & NSConnectionDownloadDelegate, opening a new room to add more feature to NSURLConnection methods. (from iOS5 on)

So I think it is an improvement, not limiting their use.