How do I run Asynchronous callbacks in Playground

Question

Many Cocoa and CocoaTouch methods have completion callbacks implemented as blocks in Objective-C and Closures in Swift. However, when trying these out in Playground, the co

Answer 1

The reason the callbacks are not called is because the RunLoop isn't running in Playground (or in REPL mode for that matter).

A somewhat janky, but effective, way to make the callbacks operate is with a flag and then manually iterating on the runloop:

// Playground - noun: a place where people can play

import Cocoa
import XCPlayground

let url = NSURL(string: "http://stackoverflow.com")
let request = NSURLRequest(URL: url)

var waiting = true

NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, queue:NSOperationQueue.currentQueue() {
response, maybeData, error in
    waiting = false
    if let data = maybeData {
        let contents = NSString(data:data, encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding)
        println(contents)
    } else {
        println(error.localizedDescription)
    }
}

while(waiting) {
    NSRunLoop.currentRunLoop().runMode(NSDefaultRunLoopMode, beforeDate: NSDate())
    usleep(10)
}

This pattern has often been used in Unit Tests which need to test async callbacks, for example: Pattern for unit testing async queue that calls main queue on completion