SICT

DPS923 & MAP523

Mobile App Development for iOS

Notes Topics Weekly Resources Graded work Professor Code examples

DPS923 MAP523 Week 6 Notes

Thursday, February 6 - classroom lecture
Monday, February 10 - hands-on in the computer-lab

This week and next, we learn how to use the network.


Thursday plan

Plan for this week:

Covered in class, and some of the same information about the new / established way to interact with a web API.

Covered in class, and some of the same information about sending data to a web API.


Code examples

The course’s GitHub repo has code examples for many topics and techniques. You can download a zip of the code repo, or clone it.


Monday plan

A short time, at the beginning of class, to show-and-tell the “add new” pattern.

Mostly, time to work on the programming assignment, and get help from a classmate or the professor if you need it.


Summary

Here’s a list of topics that we learned something about this week:

  1. The Data(contentsOf:) initializer is blocking, and it’s for fetch (HTTP GET) only, so it should NEVER be used in a real app
  2. The URL Loading System is the name of the collection of techniques and code assets that provide access to resources identified by URLs
  3. Loading is an async task, done on a background thread
  4. The key component is an URLSession object, a “container” which coordinates network tasks
  5. Each task is a URLSessionDataTask, which represents the lifetime of ONE specific network task
  6. A data task can be configured to send OR receive
  7. It expects and works with in-memory data structures
  8. The data structures are always defined by data model classes
  9. The data task - for fetch (HTTP GET) - needs a URL at a minimum
  10. The data task initializer needs a URL and a closure function (that will execute when the data task completes)
  11. Upon completion, the data task calls the closure function, with values for three parameters (data, response, error)
  12. Inside the closure function, we must do three tasks…
  13. The first task is to check for an error
  14. The second task is to ensure that the response is what we expect
  15. The third task is to unpack the data
  16. Assuming success, the unpacked data is saved (copied or assigned) to an in-memory object (and then used in whatever way you want)
  17. Often, we will update the user interface (UI)
  18. To update the UI, we must get a reference to the main thread, because the data task is running on a background thread
  19. After the statement that creates and configures a data task, the task does not execute - instead, we must add a statement that executes the task
  20. If we want to send data to the web API, we must modify our approach
  21. We use a URLRequest object, and configure it with all four things that it needs (URL, method, headers, body)
  22. Other minor changes are needed to prepare the data to be sent and handle the response