Question

I am currently trying to have a time out of 20 second when making an async request.

The issue am having is that the NSURLconnection runs on the main thread and therefore, if I run an NSTIMER to count the number of seconds that has passed, it never fires the selector since the NSURLconnection is blocking the main thread. I can probably run the NSURLconnection on a different thread since it is thread safe but I have weird issues with my delegates not being called etc.. any help is appreciated.

Below is my sniplet:

    NSURL *requestURL = [NSURL URLWithString:SERVER];
    NSMutableURLRequest *req = [[[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:requestURL] autorelease];
    theConnection = [[NSURLConnection alloc]initWithRequest:req delegate:self];


if (!timeoutTimer) {
    NSLog(@"Create timer");
    timeoutTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:TIMEOUT target:self selector:@selector(cancelURLConnection) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];

}

Answer 1

The asynchronous methods of NSURLConnection do not block the main thread. If your timer isn’t firing, this has other reasons. Your problems with using it on a background thread result from the fact that a background thread doesn’t have a runloop by default.