I need in my application to download directories and their content. So I decided to implement a NSOperationQueue and I subclassed NSOperation to implement NSURLRequest etc...
The problem is I add all the operations at once and I can't figure out when all the files for one directory are downloaded in order to update the UI and enable this specific directory.
Now I have to wait that all the files from all the directories are downloaded in order to update the UI.
I already implemented key-value observing for the operationCount of the NSOperationQueue and the isFinished of the NSOperation but I don't know when a directory has all the files in it !
I forgot to mention that my operations are concurrent. Is your example still ok ? –
DabrutApr 3 '12 at 21:37
Of course, that's the whole point of dependencies. In a non-concurrent operation queue you would just add your operations in the correct order to achieve the same. But an operation will not run until all its dependencies have finished executing. –
Matthias BauchApr 4 '12 at 10:08
One approach would be to create some sort of Directory class with a properties such as loadedCount (initially 0) and fileCount (initialized to however many files are in the directory) and create a dictionary mapping each NSOperation to the appropriate Directory before adding the operation to the queue. Inside your callback for isFinished, you could pull the Directory object for the given NSOperation out of the dictionary and increment the directory.loadedCount by 1. If your directory.loadedCount == directory.fileCount, trigger an update to the UI.
You can refactor your code to avoid enqueuing all requests at once. Enqueue only requests for a single directory at a time. When operationCount reaches zero, you can be sure that all the requests either completed or failed, update the UI and enqueue the requests for the next directory. Proceed until the array of directories is empty.
The advantages are:
relative simplicity
you don't have to query the file system only to figure out what has been downloaded
if need be, you can re-enqueue failed requests without changing other logic.