blog/source/_posts/2013-09-03-global-request-management-with-restkit.markdown

layout	title	date	comments	categories	description
post	Global response management with RestKit	2013-09-03 13:15	true	ios restkit	RESTKIT how to handle request failures global

For our latest iOS app we are using RestKit Framework, which is a really great and advanced library to communicate to your REST API.

When you have lots of requests in different areas of your project, you may want to have a global handling for failure events. For example how an Login View, if any of the requests gives you an 401 (Unauthorized) status code.

In RestKit 0.20 they introduced the oppertunity to register your own RKObjectRequestOperation, which is the common way to do this.

So at first you create a subclass of RKObjectRequestOperation, let's call it CustomRKObjectRequestOperation

#import "RKObjectRequestOperation.h"

@interface CustomRKObjectRequestOperation : RKObjectRequestOperation

@end

@implementation CustomRKObjectRequestOperation

- (void)setCompletionBlockWithSuccess:(void ( ^ ) ( RKObjectRequestOperation *operation , RKMappingResult *mappingResult ))success failure:(void ( ^ ) ( RKObjectRequestOperation *operation , NSError *error ))failure
{
    [super setCompletionBlockWithSuccess:^void(RKObjectRequestOperation *operation , RKMappingResult *mappingResult) {
        if (success) {
            success(operation, mappingResult);
        }
        
    }failure:^void(RKObjectRequestOperation *operation , NSError *error) {
        
        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"connectionFailure" object:operation];
        
        if (failure) {
            failure(operation, error);
        }
        
    }];
}

@end

This is the point where we overwrite the method which sets the completion and failure block. I use the Observer Pattern (NSNotificationCenter) to notify about connectionFailures. (Learn more about NSNotificationCenter)

Of course we need to tell RestKit to use our custom RKObjectRequestOperation class. You can do this by adding this line to you RestKit configuration:

[[RKObjectManager sharedManager] registerRequestOperationClass:[CustomRKObjectRequestOperation class]];

Now we need a class where we listen to the failure notifications. You can choose any of your class, I use the AppDelegate for this.

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(connectionFailedWithOperation:) name:@"connectionFailure" object:nil];

As you should know, the connectionFailedWithOperation: is called when a connection failure occures.

- (void)connectionFailedWithOperation:(NSNotification *)notification
{
    RKObjectRequestOperation *operation = (RKObjectRequestOperation *)notification.object;
    if (operation) {
        
        NSInteger statusCode = operation.HTTPRequestOperation.response.statusCode;

        switch (statusCode) {
            case 0: // No internet connection
            {
            }
                break;
            case  401: // not authenticated
            {
            }
                break;
                
            default:
            {
            }
                break;
        }
    }
}

Links:
RestKit Framework
Class Documentation for RKObjectRequestOperation

by Albert Schulz
If you have any questions feel free to contact me:
eMail: mail@halfco.de
Twitter: @albert_sn
Web: halfco.de