How to avoid huge functions with made up of enums and if-else or switch case when dealing with server response in iOS?

Question

in my application, I have a request type associated with variety of API calls I make to the REST server. when the response from server comes in the same delegate method for web engine's response,

I have to check the API type in the request object passed as a parameter to the delegate method and then take the corresponding action. The problem is there are around 10-12 different API request types. So the switch case that checks the different enums associated with API Types, takes action based on it.

How to get rid of this switch 'tower' ?

Answer 1

In Objective-C you can build selectors at runtime. This lets you "stringly-type" method dispatch, which removes a lot of conditional code (though replaces it with something that has its own problems). An example that shows how this might work:

- (void)sendHTTPRequest: (NSString *)request
{
 NSString *requestMethod = [NSString stringWithFormat: "send%@Request", [request upperCaseString]];
 SEL requestSelector = NSSelectorFromString(requestMethod);
 if ([self respondsToSelector: requestSelector])
 [self performSelector: requestSelector];
 else
 [self reportUnknownRequest: request];
}
- (void)sendGETRequest { ... }
- (void)sendPOSTRequest { ... }
- (void)sendDELETERequest { ...}
- (void)reportUnknownRequest: (NSString *)request { ... }

I use this approach for building parsers, for avoiding large switch statements, and for behaviour that depends on the class of a parameter in cases where putting the behaviour on the parameter classes would not be appropriate.

• Amogh Talpallikar: my classification was in terms of request type as say, user-profile,comments,article etc. the APIType is an enum for each of these that I check when I get a response for my request. Many cases they all are response of a GET request only. but I still have to check what I was asking from the server.
• Jimmy Hoffa: I don't know objective-c, but this is pretty cool. I'm a fan of the idea of message-passing style OO for exactly abstractions like this which you get from dispatch invocation instead of direct method-calling invocations of C++/java/C# style OO.
• Amogh Talpallikar: Oh.. I got the whole idea.. instead of enums, if we have striings to selectors then same piece of code works, and we can separate out code by methods. Another idea I was thinking was of having callback, blocks in dictionaries.
• user4051: Yes @amogh, or you could map your enumerated type to selectors.