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AFNetworking - How to setup requests to be retried in the event of a timeout?


I have recently migrated from ASIHTTPRequest to AFNetworking, which has been great. However, the server that I am connecting with has some issues and sometimes causes my requests to timeout. When using ASIHTTPRequest it was possible to setup a retry count on a request in the event of a timeout using the following selector

-setNumberOfTimesToRetryOnTimeout:

This can be further referenced in this post, Can an ASIHTTPRequest be retried?

This is AFNetworking if you are unfamiliar https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking#readme

I was unable to find an equivalent api in AFNetworking, has anyone found a solution for retrying network requests in the event of timeout using AFNetworking?


Solution

  • Matt Thompson developer of AFNetworking was kind enough to answer this for me. Below is the github link explaining the solution.

    https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/issues/393

    Basically, AFNetworking doesn't support this functionality. It is left to the developer to implement on a case by case basis as shown below (taken from Matt Thompson's answer on github)

    - (void)downloadFileRetryingNumberOfTimes:(NSUInteger)ntimes 
                                  success:(void (^)(id responseObject))success 
                                  failure:(void (^)(NSError *error))failure
    {
        if (ntimes <= 0) {
            if (failure) {
                NSError *error = ...;
                failure(error);
            }
        } else {
            [self getPath:@"/path/to/file" parameters:nil success:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, id responseObject) {
                if (success) {
                    success(...);
                }
            } failure:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, NSError *error) {
                [self downloadFileRetryingNumberOfTimes:ntimes - 1 success:success failure:failure];
            }];
        }
    }