Swift 3 - How to handle URLRequest / URLSession errors? - ios

Question

I want to know how you guys handle errors when using a URLRequest in your app. How do you go about notifying your users that an error has occurred? Do you even notify your users at all? Do you try and reload the URLRequest again? Do you tell your users to close the current screen and open it again with an alert box? I have no clue.
Once there's an error, your app stops. So what do you do when this happens and you have a network issue, bad Json data?
What do you do when you get a "Bad Network Connection (The server is down)" or the URLSession comes back with an error and the internet connection is fine?
Please look at the code below and help me figure out what needs to be done when an error occurs.
let url = URL(string:"http://example/jsonFile.php")
var request = URLRequest(url:url!)
request.httpMethod = "POST"
let postingString = "id=\(id)"
request.httpBody = postingString.data(using: String.Encoding.utf8)
let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request as URLRequest){(data, response, error) -> Void in
if error != nil {
print("error \(error)")
// *****
// What do you do here? Do you tell your users anything?
// *****
return
}
// Check for Error
if let urlContent = data {
do{
let jsonResult = try JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: urlContent, options: .allowFragments) as! [String: AnyObject]
print("jsonResult \(jsonResult)")
}
catch{
print("JSON serialization failed")
// *****
// What do you do here? Do you tell your users anything?
// *****
}
}
}
task.resume()

Answer 1

It is often a bad idea to hide the errors and do nothing (see Error Hiding Anti-Pattern). Unfortunately, handling errors is not easy and can be tedious some times. Pretty code examples quickly become "uglier" when exceptions and errors have to be handled. It takes time to learn to do it well.
In the case of network connections, you would want to wrap your requests into asynchronous methods that take a completion callback as parameter. This callback will often receive a successful result or an error, sometimes wrapped in an enum to remove ambiguity (see Result as an example).
Once you know a network request has failed, you can present that information to the user in a clean, informational but non-obstructive way. To find out what other applications do in this scenario, turn on Airplane Mode in your phone and poke around.
Here are some examples:
Apple Music
Facebook Messenger