I am using the new PushStreamContent entity in MVC4 to stream notifications from my web server back to multiple listening iOS clients (they are using NSURLConnection). The messages being sent are JSON. When I send messages that are less than 1024 bytes, the message sends as expected. Sending messages larger than this size however causes the client to receive the message in multiple chunks, each being 1024 bytes.
I am wondering what is the best way for my iOS clients to consume these multiple messages coming back? Is there a way to have NSURLConnection aggregate the results for me, or do I need to implement something that gets a result, checks if it's valid json, if not wait for the next result and append the previous, and continue until it is valid? What is a better way of doing this?
I found that you are able to adjust the size of the buffer that writes data to the stream that PushStreamContent uses. However, chunking the data is the correct thing for it to do and keeping this small has several advantages. I ended up writing my own method to aggregate the data flowing in on the client side. See the following question for more details:
How to handle chunking while streaming JSON data to NSURLConnection