How to wait for a thread to finish in Objective-C

Question

I\'m trying to use a method from a class I downloaded somewhere. The method executes in the background while program execution continues. I do not want to allow program exec

Answer 1

Use an NSOperationQueue, like this
(from memory so forgive any minor errors -- you'll get the basic idea):

// ivars
NSOperationQueue *opQueue = [[NSOperationQueue alloc] init];
// count can be anything you like
[opQueue setMaxConcurrentOperationCount:5];

- (void)main
{
    [self doStuffInOperations];
}

// method
- (void)doStuffInOperations
{
    // do parallel task A
    [opQueue addOperation:[[[NSInvocationOperation alloc] initWithTarget:self selector:@selector(doSomething:) object:@"a"] autorelease]];

    // do parallel task B
    [opQueue addOperation:[[[NSInvocationOperation alloc] initWithTarget:self selector:@selector(doSomething:) object:@"b"] autorelease]];

    // do parallel task C
    [opQueue addOperation:[[[NSInvocationOperation alloc] initWithTarget:self selector:@selector(doSomething:) object:@"c"] autorelease]];


    [opQueue waitUntilAllOperationsHaveFinished];

    // now, do stuff that requires A, B, and C to be finished, and they should be finished much faster because they are in parallel.
}

- (void)doSomething:(id)arg
{
    // do whatever you want with the arg here 
    // (which is in the background, 
    // because all NSOperations added to NSOperationQueues are.)
}