ios - Wait For Asynchronous Operation To Complete in Swift

Question

I am not sure how to handle this situation as I am very new to iOS development and Swift. I am performing data fetching like so:

func application(application: UIApplication!, performFetchWithCompletionHandler completionHandler: ((UIBackgroundFetchResult) -> Void)!)
{
    loadShows()
    completionHandler(UIBackgroundFetchResult.NewData)
    println("Background Fetch Complete")
}

My loadShows() function parses a bunch of data it gets from a website loaded into a UIWebView. The problem is that I have a timer that waits for 10 seconds or so in the loadShows function. This allows for the javascript in the page to fully load before I start parsing the data. My problem is that the completion handler completes before my loadShows() does.

What I would like to do is add a bool for "isCompletedParsingShows" and make the completionHandler line wait to complete until that bool is true. What is the best way to handle this?

Answer 1

you have to pass your async function the handler to call later on:

func application(application: UIApplication!, performFetchWithCompletionHandler completionHandler: ((UIBackgroundFetchResult) -> Void)!) {
    loadShows(completionHandler)
}

func loadShows(completionHandler: ((UIBackgroundFetchResult) -> Void)!) {
    //....
    //DO IT
    //....

    completionHandler(UIBackgroundFetchResult.NewData)
    println("Background Fetch Complete")
}

OR (cleaner way IMHO)

add an intermediate completionHandler

func application(application: UIApplication!, performFetchWithCompletionHandler completionHandler: ((UIBackgroundFetchResult) -> Void)!) {
    loadShows() {
        completionHandler(UIBackgroundFetchResult.NewData)
        println("Background Fetch Complete")
    }
}

func loadShows(completionHandler: (() -> Void)!) {
    //....
    //DO IT
    //....
    completionHandler()
}