Book Image

RestKit for iOS

By : Taras Kalapun
Book Image

RestKit for iOS

By: Taras Kalapun

Overview of this book

<p>RestKit is an iOS framework for streamlining communication with web services, and it relies on the AFNetworking library that is used by thousands of app developers. It has an interface that is elegant and well designed, and it provides a powerful object-mapping engine that integrates well with the CoreData database. RestKit for iOS will teach you everything from loading a simple list of objects to creating a fully-featured app.<br /><br />RestKit for iOS delivers constructive tools and insights into app development that will benefit any app developer. The book starts with a simple example and then moves on to more complex ones as your knowledge increases. By the end of the guide, you will be able to build a fully-featured app that uses RESTful web services and performs CRUD object manipulation.<br /><br />RestKit for iOS will provide you with all the information you need to boost the development process of both simple and complex apps. Once you have executed a simple example and reviewed the basic theory, you will move on to more advanced concepts with descriptions of real-life scenarios and how to overcome bottlenecks. RestKit for iOS is full of real-life examples that show you how to simplify data loading, basic and advanced object mapping, metadata mapping, and routing. This book also teaches you about routing, RESTful object manipulation and synchronization, integration with the user interface, and caching</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Integrating with UI and DRYing the table view


In this section, we will cover how RestKit might be integrated with our application User Interface.

The application we are building is a typical business app. It heavily uses tables (such as UITableViewController) to present the loaded data (list of objects) to the user. In our case, the types of data that are available from the web service for presentation to the user in a table view are:

  • Databases

  • Collections

  • Documents

  • Plans

  • Indexes

  • Invoices

  • Deployments

Each of these table view controllers does basically the same thing, it loads a list of objects through a GET request on a specific path, and shows it to the user. It also provides the ability to edit the list with actions, such as delete an object, edit an object, and add a new object. So, for keeping our code clean and not repeating it, the advice is to create a generic table view controller, with properties and methods that our subclasses will define/override. Such an approach of creating generic controllers...