when forming request using requestWithURL, url changes & also goes missing - ios

Question

When I investigate this method in xcode debug mode, a few strange things happen when constructing the request.
Extra characters get added to the urlString. For instance, if SessionId = "abc", then after executing the line starting at NSURLRequest *request..., the debugger shows that SessionUrlString = "...session/abc\x03" instead of simply "...session/abc". This is despite the fact that the debugger still shows SessionId = "abc". Why is this?
The request object doesn't appear to contain the url
anywhere, even though its constructor just took that url as a variable. Where did it go? Is it stored in the request object somewhere in the AFHTTPCLient object?
-(NSObject*)makeRequestForSessionUsingId: (NSString *)SessionId{
NSString *baseSessionURLString = [kCwAPIBaseURLString stringByAppendingString:#"session/"];
NSString *SessionURLString = [baseSessionURLString stringByAppendingString:SessionId];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:SessionURLString];
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
__block NSObject *sessionJSON = [[NSObject alloc] init];
AFJSONRequestOperation *operation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) {
NSLog(#"IP Address: %#", [JSON valueForKeyPath:#"origin"]);
sessionJSON = JSON;
} failure:nil];
[operation start];
return sessionJSON;
}

Answer 1

I'm not sure what's causing the trailing characters in your URL string but if you can output it in an NSLog statement and it shows up correctly it's probably correct.
NSURLRequest stores the URL you create it with in it's - URL property which you can see in the documentation. This means you should be able to use something like:
NSLog(#"Request URL: %#", [request URL]);
To see the URL.
The bigger issue I see here is your return pattern. If this AFJSONRequestOperation takes any amount of time the value that is returned will be an empty sessionJSON variable. When you run [operation start]; the operation does not, by default, wait to complete before returning the value you specify. There is a way to make it wait but you never want to block any threads waiting for a network request that could take longer than you hope. You have some other options here for what you could do but mainly you have to think about it in a different way. Pretty much everything you want to do with the response from the network request needs to be done in the success and failure blocks. This method should not try and return a value (unless it's in the form of another block). Some ways you could do this:
Store the response JSON in a #property on your class. After doing that call a method [self foo]; that then uses the stored response to do what you want.
In the block call a method passing the response json [self foo:JSON]
Post an NSNotification with the response as an object.
Pass a block to this method that you then call passing the response back to the original caller.