Upgrading to AFNetworking - ios

Question

I am taking over an old iOS project from developers no longer part of the project - the app is getting a rewrite and with that I am going to support iOS7 and upwards only.
So, I wanted to use AFNetworking 2.0 instead of ASIHTTPRequest - the reason behind this is NSURLSeesion. AFNetworking 2.0 supports NSURLSession and with that I can get my app to download content in the background at opportunistic times (According to Apple - NSURLSession must be used and Background Fetch mode turned on, for this to work? )
Let me start out by saying I am a new developer to iOS and networking stuff goes a little over my head - but I am determined to learn more about it and as much as I can. I have read AFNetworking documentation as well, but I fear since some of the terminology escapes me (Request, Response, Sterilisation, etc) - I am not grasping them 100%.
So, I took a look at the ASIHTTPRequest code the previous developer used to, from what I can see, build a GET / POST request - This is the code they used:
+ (ASIHTTPRequest*) buildRequest: (NSString*) url RequestType: (NSString*) requestType
PostData: (NSString*) postData
Host: (NSString*) host
ContentType: (NSString*) contentType
SoapAction: (NSString*) soapAction
RequestProperties: (NSDictionary*) requestProperties
{
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString: url];
ASIHTTPRequest *request = [[[ASIHTTPRequest alloc] initWithURL:u] autorelease];
[request setDidFinishSelector:#selector(requestDone:)];
[request setDidFailSelector:#selector(requestWentWrong:)];
[request setTimeOutSeconds:20];
[request setQueuePriority:NSOperationQueuePriorityVeryHigh];
if (host != nil)
[request addRequestHeader: #"Host" value: host];
if (contentType != nil)
[request addRequestHeader: #"Content-Type" value: contentType];
if (soapAction != nil)
[request addRequestHeader: #"SOAPAction" value:soapAction];
if (requestType != nil)
[request setRequestMethod: requestType];
if (postData != nil)
{
NSMutableData* mPostData = [NSMutableData dataWithData:[postData dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
NSString *msgLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%d", [postData length]];
[request setPostBody: mPostData];
[request addRequestHeader: #"Content-Length" value:msgLength];
}
if (requestProperties != nil)
{
for (int i = 0; i < [[requestProperties allKeys] count]; i++)
{
[request addRequestHeader:[[requestProperties allKeys] objectAtIndex: i] value: [requestProperties objectForKey:[[requestProperties allKeys] objectAtIndex: i]]];
}
}
return request;
}
I'm trying to understand this code and upgrade it to use AFNetworking V2.0 instead. I assume, just replacing ASIHTTPRequest with AFHTTPRequestOperation will not do the trick, correct?

Answer 1

I have been given some help and also managed to do a lot of digging around to see how I can get this right.
I made the method simpler - as I did not need Soap / Content-type, etc - just urlParamerters and some basic stuff:
This is the answer I came up with:
+ (AFHTTPSessionManager *) buildRequest: (NSString*) url RequestType: (NSString*) requestType PostDataValuesAndKeys: (NSDictionary*) postData RequestProperties: (NSDictionary*) requestProperties
{
AFHTTPSessionManager *manager = [AFHTTPSessionManager manager];
manager.responseSerializer = [AFHTTPResponseSerializer serializer];
if ([requestType isEqualToString:#"GET"])
{
[manager GET:url parameters:postData success:^(NSURLSessionDataTask *dataTask, id responseObject){
//Success
NSLog (#"Success");
NSData *xmlData = responseObject;
NSLog(#"Got XML Data: %#", xmlData);
}
failure:^(NSURLSessionDataTask *dataTask, NSError *error){
//Failure
NSLog (#"Failure");
}];
}else if ([requestType isEqualToString:#"GT"]){
[manager POST:url parameters:postData success:^(NSURLSessionDataTask *dataTask, id responseObject){
//Success
}
failure:^(NSURLSessionDataTask *dataTask, NSError *error){
//Failure
NSLog (#"Failure");
}];
}
return manager;
}
It will work for what I need it to do - but I am not sure if it's the best way to do it.
I couldn't see how I could detect the requestType other thank with looking at the NSString value. I looked into the AFHTTPSessionManager.h file for some clues on what to do with that - Matt suggests overriding the GET / POST methods if I want them done differently - per his comments in the header file:
Methods to Override
To change the behavior of all data task operation construction, which
is also used in the GET / POST / et al. convenience methods,
override dataTaskWithRequest:completionHandler:.
Also there is a requestSerializer property in that file - which you could use to detect the type of request - however it's implementation goes to the super class: AFURLSessionManager
In that class - there is a requestWithMethodmethod.
So, I tried to do this instead:
If I try implement that method - then I am not using the convince methods in AFHTTPSessionManager:
(NSURLSessionDataTask *)GET:(NSString *)URLString
parameters:(NSDictionary *)parameters
success:(void (^)(NSURLSessionDataTask *task, id responseObject))success
failure:(void (^)(NSURLSessionDataTask *task, NSError *error))failure;
Unless I have that completely wrong. After that I decided to just check the requestType using [NSString isEqualToString]