BigBrother - SwiftGit

Activity Indicator Animation

BigBrother

September 24, 2023

BIGBROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

BigBrother is a Swift library made for iOS that automatically watches for any performed request and sets the network activity indicator.

This is mostly a proof of concept, having several limitations because of how NSURLProtocol works. Some of them are:

NSURLProtocol doesn’t inherit NSURLSession‘s configured headers (see Alamofire/Alamofire#473)
NSURLProtocol isn’t compatible with authentication APIs (see https://github.com/marcelofabri/BigBrother/issues/2)

It was inspired by this comment by Mattt Thompson.

It also was based on this tutorial for creating an NSURLProtocol and on AFNetworkActivityIndicatorManager from AFNetworking.

Usage

Adding

Adding to NSURLConnection and NSURLSession.sharedSession()


                                              
                                                BigBrother.addToSharedSession()

Adding to a custom NSURLSessionConfiguration


                                              
                                                var configuration = NSURLSessionConfiguration.defaultSessionConfiguration()
BigBrother.addToSessionConfiguration(configuration)
let session = NSURLSession(configuration: configuration)

Removing

Removing from NSURLConnection and NSURLSession.sharedSession ()


                                              
                                                BigBrother.removeFromSharedSession()

Removing from a custom NSURLSessionConfiguration


                                              
                                                var configuration = NSURLSessionConfiguration.defaultSessionConfiguration()
BigBrother.removeFromSessionConfiguration(configuration)
let newSession = NSURLSession(configuration: configuration)

REMINDER

It is important to configure your NSURLSessionConfiguration object appropriately before using it to initialize a session object. Session objects make a copy of the configuration settings you provide and use those settings to configure the session. Once configured, the session object ignores any changes you make to the NSURLSessionConfiguration object. If you need to modify your transfer policies, you must update the session configuration object and use it to create a new NSURLSession object.

Advanced usage

BigBrother.URLProtocol is an NSURLProtocol subclass that manages the network activity indicator and it’s public if you want to add it yourself to an NSURLSessionConfiguration or to the default NSURLProtocol (used by NSURLConnection and NSURLSession.sharedSession()).

BigBrother.Manager is also public, so you can manage the network activity indicator directly:


                                              
                                                BigBrother.Manager.sharedInstance.incrementActivityCount()
// do something…
BigBrother.Manager.sharedInstance.decrementActivityCount()

Installation

BigBrother is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:


                                              
                                                pod ‘BigBrother’

Then run pod install with CocoaPods 0.36 or newer.

Unit Tests

Unit testing is done with XCTest and the tests are available under the BigBrotherTests folder.

GitHub

View Github