Question

I’m in the process of investigating AFNetworking as a replacement for ASIHTTPRequest, and notice a complete lack of information on whether it supports background downloads/uploads.

With an ASIHTTPReqeust object, all you have to do is call [request setShouldContinueWhenAppEntersBackground:YES] and the request will continue in the background. Is there any support for this in AFNetworking?

Answer 1

EDIT: As of AFNetworking 1.0RC1, this is an explicit feature. AFURLConnectionOperation now has the method setShouldExecuteAsBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:, which transparently manages all of this for you.

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It’s an implicit feature, so I didn’t really think about advertising it. All you’d need to do is:

- (void)applicationWillResignActive:(UIApplication *)application {
    __block UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier backgroundTaskIdentifier = [application beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:^(void) {
        [application endBackgroundTask:backgroundTaskIdentifier];
        [[YourRestClient sharedClient] cancelAllHTTPOperations];
    }];
}

Or, if you manage your operations in your own NSOperationQueue, just -cancelAllOperations here instead.