Question

I have an iOS app that I’m migrating from the very slow and clunky SOAP to a custom data format (basically CSV with some extra bits).

My priority is getting initial data to the client as quickly as possible while letting it still load more in the background. The server side is written to continuously flush data instead of caching the response.

So I’d like to parse out every line as they arrive at the client, instead of waiting for the full response.

If I view it in a browser I get progressive loading. However, using MKNetworkKit or ASIHTTPRequest or similar, I’m only able to get the full response which takes several seconds longer.

Does anyone know what the best options could be?

Answer 1

NSURLconnection can do what you want. You set the delegate and use -connection:didWriteData:totalBytesWritten:expectedTotalBytes: callback to read in a chunk of the data as it’s downloading.

It will be up to you to properly handle splitting up the lines and handling chunks containing partial lines.