Problem:
RESTkit is a great framework for building RESTful client applications on iOS but it’s a bit cumbersome and is not that easy to set up right. In our case we wanted to have a robust system that would allow us to extend it for potentially growing number of resources (i.e. endpoints/models) but at the same time leveraging the robustness of RESTkit’s internal networking and mapping implementation.
Solution:
Initially we looked at Alex Kurkin’s solution but we felt that it creates unnecessary and unused queues/pipeline for every RKObjectManager subclass. Instead we decided to go with a two-tier system where we have:
- Multiple
ResourceNameManagers/Helpersthat build up requests, prepare params, and interact (and also setupResponseDescriptors) with sharedRKObjectManagerinstance that performs the actual request/mapping operations. - One
RKObjectManagersubclass that has common setup for HTTP headers and Core Data/Persistence Store.
Conclusion:
This solution gives us very flexible setup that is extendable. We can have as many ResourceManagers/Helpers or their subclasses as we want, and we encapsulate shared RKObjectManager setup which doesn’t create a lot of waste but at the same time can be extended and or subclassed.
If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to share in the comments below.
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Authors: Alex Bush @alexvbush & Adam Tierney @AdamTierney
Review & Editing: Alex Petropavlovsky @petropavlovsky