Waiting until two async blocks are executed before starting another block

Question

When using GCD, we want to wait until two async blocks are executed and done before moving on to the next steps of execution. What is the best way to do that?

We tried the following, but it doesn't seem to work:

dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block1
});


dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block2
});

// wait until both the block1 and block2 are done before start block3
// how to do that?

dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block3
});

Answer 1

Use dispatch groups: see here for an example, "Waiting on Groups of Queued Tasks" in the "Dispatch Queues" chapter of Apple's iOS Developer Library's Concurrency Programming Guide

Your example could look something like this:

dispatch_group_t group = dispatch_group_create();

dispatch_group_async(group,dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block1
    NSLog(@"Block1");
    [NSThread sleepForTimeInterval:5.0];
    NSLog(@"Block1 End");
});


dispatch_group_async(group,dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block2
    NSLog(@"Block2");
    [NSThread sleepForTimeInterval:8.0];
    NSLog(@"Block2 End");
});

dispatch_group_notify(group,dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^ {
    // block3
    NSLog(@"Block3");
});

// only for non-ARC projects, handled automatically in ARC-enabled projects.
dispatch_release(group);

and could produce output like this:

2012-08-11 16:10:18.049 Dispatch[11858:1e03] Block1
2012-08-11 16:10:18.052 Dispatch[11858:1d03] Block2
2012-08-11 16:10:23.051 Dispatch[11858:1e03] Block1 End
2012-08-11 16:10:26.053 Dispatch[11858:1d03] Block2 End
2012-08-11 16:10:26.054 Dispatch[11858:1d03] Block3