Using NSOperationQueue in iOS to do Serial/Concurrent Operations.

NSOperationQueue is used to do scheduled operations in iOS. You can customize NSOperationQueue to do Concurrent/Serial operations.

You can set NSOperationQueue maxConcurrentOperationCount to tell it to do how many operations to execute at a time.

Lets see this with an example

[Swift Version]

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        
        let downloadQueue = NSOperationQueue();
        downloadQueue.maxConcurrentOperationCount = 1;
        
        for i in 1...10 {
            
            let operation : NSBlockOperation = NSBlockOperation(block: {
                 self.downloadImage(i)
            })
            
            downloadQueue.addOperation(operation);
        }
        
        
    }

    
    func downloadImage (index : Int){
        
        print("Download Started \(index)")
        sleep(2);
        print("Download Complete \(index)")
    }

}

In the above example, we set maxConcurrentOperationCount to 1, telling it to execute one by one.

[Objective C Version]

#import "ViewController.h"

@interface ViewController ()

@end

@implementation ViewController

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    
    [super viewDidLoad];
    
    // Create a new NSOperationQueue instance.
    operationQueue = [NSOperationQueue new];
    operationQueue.maxConcurrentOperationCount = 1;
    
    for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++){
        
        NSNumber* iParam = [NSNumber numberWithInt:i];
    
        // Create a new NSOperation object using the NSInvocationOperation subclass.
        NSInvocationOperation *operation = [[NSInvocationOperation alloc] initWithTarget:self
                                                                                selector:@selector(downloadImage:)
                                                                                  object:iParam];
        // Add the operation to the queue and let it to be executed.
        [operationQueue addOperation:operation];
    }
    
}

-(void) downloadImage : (NSNumber *) index{
    
    NSLog(@"Download Started %d", index.intValue);
    sleep(2);
    NSLog(@"Download Complete %d", index.intValue);
}

@end

With this you can schedule your operations so give a better user experience to the user.

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