Best way to performselectoronmainthread in objective c?

Question

I'm writing a client-server app to iPhone. And I have a question about threading. When I access my online database from the device, I need to do this on a separate thread to not freeze the UI/main thread. But when responding to the data I've fetched from the database I call this method on the main thread: performSelectorOnMainThread. The thing is that this only lets me send one argument/object to the method (WithObject), sometimes I have more arguments I want to pass. and another thing about it is that I HAVE TO pass this one object. I can't pass nil, if I do the app crashes.

This is my code today.. and I'm worried that I'm using the methods and threading the wrong way.

- (IBAction)testServerAction:(id)sender {

    [self.imageView setHidden:YES];
    [self.activityView setHidden:NO];
    [self.activityView startAnimating];
    dispatch_queue_t testServer = dispatch_queue_create("Test-Server-Thread", NULL);
    dispatch_async(testServer, ^{

        if ([self.arrayWithServerConnections count] > 0)
        {
            NSString *messageToShow;
            if ([self testServerMethod])
            {
                messageToShow = @"Server is working!";
                [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(showMessageBoxWithString:) withObject:messageToShow waitUntilDone:YES];
                [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(threadedUIActivityRemover:) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:YES];
            }else
            {
                messageToShow = @"Server is NOT working!";
                [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(showMessageBoxWithString:) withObject:messageToShow waitUntilDone:YES];
                [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(threadedUIActivityRemover:) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:YES];
            }
        }

    });

    dispatch_release(testServer);
}

-(void)threadedUIActivityRemover:(NSString *)string
{
    [self.imageView setHidden:NO];
    [self.activityView setHidden:YES];
    [self.activityView stopAnimating];
}

Is this a good way of doing this, is there anything besides performSelectorOnMainThread this you can point me to, that works better?

As you can see I pass nil to an NSString argument in this example, because I HAVE to pass something, if I don't have NSString as an arg in the method, the app crashes evan when passing nil.. Why is this?.. please make this a bit clearer for me!

//Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, you're already using dispatch_async. Then you should just use

     dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(),^ { ... } );

from inside your background thread to perform things on the main thread. For example,

     if ([self testServerMethod])
        {
            dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(),^ {
               [self showMessageBoxWithString: @"Server is working!"];
               [self threadedUIActivityRemover:nil];
            } );
        }else ...

It doesn't have any constraint on the number of arguments for the methods you call.

Answer 2

Pass a collection, such as a dictionary of unarchived objects.

Answer 3

You can also use an NSInvocation.

Answer 4

since you are passing instance variables, another option would be to pass self and make self thread safe.