Using blocks in Restkit (like ASIHttpRequest Blocks)

Question

i have been using the block support extensively in ASIHttpRequest, and i have found it to be an extremely elegant way of coding async requests, much more so than having the delegate call back a seperate function

Here is the example code for quick reference.

   __block ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:url];
   [request setCompletionBlock:^{
      NSString *responseString = [request responseString];
   }];
   [request startAsynchronous];

I would like to start using Restkit, but I need to be able to use Restkit with blocks as well.

I have seen the wrapper here Restkit Block Wrapper, but would like to check if that wrapper would work well in production, and if anyone have used it extensively before

Answer 1

I have not used the RestKit Block wrapper yet, but I will be shortly. I'm actually removing ASIHTTPRequest from my App and replacing with RestKit. Not because it's bad, ASIHTTP* is quite stable - but it isn't evolving. While many other libraries, like RestKit, wrap NSURLConnection and so reap the benefits of Apples continuing enhancements to it, ASIHTTP* uses CFNetwork. Apple isn't investing a lot of effort in improving preexisting Core Foundation classes (like CFNetwork). Also, since ASIHTTP* depends on CF, it's going to be a royal pain to migrate to ARC when it's available; I wan't the benefits of ARC as soon as possible.

Answer 2

Blocks support for all the basic delegate tasks on RKRequest and RKObjectLoader will be coming in 0.9.4

Answer 3

Yesterday, Blake released verson 0.9.3 which features the usage of blocks for the Object Mapper (other methods were already ready for blocks). You should take look at the new features.

Answer 4

For a quick code sample to use RestKit with blocks, I derived this snippet from http://kalapun.com/blog/2012/05/17/how-i-restkit/

[[RKClient sharedClient] get:@"/fooBar" usingBlock:^(RKRequest *request) {

    request.onDidLoadResponse = ^(RKResponse *response) {

        NSLog(@"Retrieved XML: %@", [response bodyAsString]); 
    };
}];