Add UIProgressView for [PFObject pinInBackground] to monitor when pin is complete

Question

I think this is a fairly simple question...but we'll see about that.

My setup: Xcode: 6.3.2; Parse: 1.7.4; Language: Obj-C

I have a bunch of PFObjects that are displayed in a TableView and within each Cell there is a button that the use can tap to pin that individual PFObject to localDatastore, so if they were to lose WiFi later on he/she could still access that object and view its contents.

What I would like to do is display a UIProgressView/UIProgressBar to monitor the progress of the object being pinned (some of my objects contain large files that may take up to 30 seconds to pin). This way the user knows for sure that the object has been saved completely and there is smaller chance they will assume the object save immediately and turned off WiFi or something else happens to jeopardize his/her internet connection.

Is there straightforward way to do this with Parse??

Answer 1

Negative.

PFObject currently doesn't have a 'save' with a progress block like a PFFile does (https://parse.com/docs/ios/api/Classes/PFFile.html#//api/name/saveInBackgroundWithProgressBlock:). See SDK reference here for future references. This is a great resource I suggest you save it to your bookmarks, not specifically the PFObject page but the SDK API reference in general: https://parse.com/docs/ios/api/Classes/PFObject.html

There are ways to do this, mostly personal preference, however its just like any other async call, you will have to populate a progress HUD yourself, since its not API friendly yet. This is a fairly simple process to start yourself, and as a developer you should learn how to do this anyways, you learn a lot about network calls and how tasks operate on threads etc. In the meantime, as a quick fix you could simply just populate a UIActivityIndicator collectively with pinInBackgroundWithBlock: and set userInteractionEnabled to No for whatever views you want simply as a visual aide on the users end, and then hide it when complete and set userInteractionEnabled back to Yes.