ASIHTTPRequest documentation

v1.0.5 26rd July 2009

• Fixed a potential crasher where requests might attempt to access the readstream after it had been released
• ASIHTTPRequest now generates a nice user agent for you if you don't set one yourself, assuming you've set a CFBundleDisplayName or CFBundleName. Thanks to Andy Fowler for the code!
• url is now a publicly settable property to get around problems with subclasses. Thanks to Charley Lanusse for his bug report!
• Updated GHUnit, Tests now build on the device
• Fix tests so they pass on the device (attempting to write outside the sandbox, doh!)
• Progress delegate-related tests should be more reliable

v1.0.4 23rd July 2009

• requestCookies is now emptied before a redirect. Any cookies in the persistent store (including session cookies) will be re-applied. This will ensure cookies are not present in the redirected request more than once, and that they won't be presented to the wrong domain (if we redirect to a different domain).
• Fixed a memory leak that crept in with the new redirection code

Thanks again to Austin France for taking the time to track these down!

• ASINetworkQueue's requestsCount property is now public-readable

v1.0.3 19th July 2009

• All convenience constructors (eg [ASINetworkQueue queue]) now return instances of the class they were called on, so you can now safely use these in your subclasses
• ASINetworkQueue now shows the network activity indicator (in the status bar) on the iPhone platform when network operations are in progress
• ASINetworkQueues now use accessors throughout to make subclassing less painful

Many thanks to Ken Collins for his patch and pointing me at his subclass!

18th July 2009

• Added gzip compression for request bodies (More info)
• Various tweaks and cleanups

v1.0.2 16th July 2009

Fixed a nasty bug where requests would call both their didFinishSelector and didFailSelector under certain circumstances. I've added checks that should ensure this never happens.

Many thanks to Mike DeSaro for reporting this issue!

v1.0.1 15th July 2009

• ASIHTTPRequest will now redirect as a GET request when it encounters a 303 HTTP status code, regardless of the original request method, as per RFC2616. Many thanks to Rick Moynihan for pointing out this problem!
• S3: Added object copy support

v1.0 14th July 2009

• Added experimental support for Amazon S3 (More info here)
• Automatic redirection for 30x status codes is now handled by ASIHTTPRequest rather than CFNetwork. This means that the redirected request will use cookies set by the initial request. This might well be useful if you use session-based authentication and want to authenticate in your very first request. Many thanks to Austin France for highlighting this issue!

v0.995 25th June 2009

ASIHTTPRequest should now auto-detect system proxy settings, and apply those to requests. Mac apps using ASIHTTPRequest will now need to link against the SystemConfiguration framework, this is not necessary for iPhone apps.

This hasn't had a lot of testing (I used Privoxy as a test server), so please let me know if you experience problems.

Thanks to everyone who requested this, most recently Malcolm Hall, Bill Tschumy and John Ngo.

v0.994 21st June 2009

Removed NSHTTPCookieAdditions, replaced with ASINSStringAdditions.

Cookies values are no longer automatically encoded and decoded because NSHTTPCookie won't let you create cookies containing certain characters (eg line breaks), which would cause an exception while building responseCookies when a (valid, url-encoded) line break was present in the value.

Cookies values stored in the shared NSHTTPCookieStorage store are now stored with their values encoded.

If you want to create cookies manually in your own apps, you should encode the string you are using as the value with [myValue encodedCookieValue].

If you need to read the value of a cookie, you can use [[cookie value] decodedCookieValue] to get a url-decoded representation of the cookie value.

This change means that cookies stored in the shared cookie storage with previous versions of ASIHTTPRequest will be presented to the server un-encoded, which might cause problems.

Including ASINSStringAdditions.h and ASINSStringAdditions.m in your own programs is optional - if you don't want to read url-decoded cookie values, or to build you own cookies, you don't need them.

This release also includes various fixes:

• Setting an empty string for a form post value with an ASIFormDataRequest should work now (Thanks to Jacky for finding this!)
• Fixed some problems with SSL error detection on the iPhone platform (Thanks to Jane Sales for catching this!)
• Tweaked the sample code the documentation to remove the autoreleased NSOperationQueue, because an autoreleased queue might be unsafe (Thanks to Scotch Vail for pointing this out!)
• Update docs to point out the iPhone 3.0 SDK makes upload progress tracking work better (Thanks, Apple!)

v0.99 7th June 2009

Added validatesSecureCertificate property. Set this to no to skip the validation of secure certificates, for example when using self-signed certificates during testing. DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION. :)

Thanks to everyone who requested this, most recently Aaron Attar and Gary Fung.

v0.98 31st May 2009

• ASIHTTPRequest should now redirect automatically when it encounters a 30x header. You can disable this by setting shouldRedirect to NO. (Thanks to Michele Campeotto for this suggestion!)
• Added convenience constructors:
  

  ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:url];
  ASIFormDataRequest *request = [ASIFormDataRequest requestWithURL:url];
  ASINetworkQueue *queue = [ASINetworkQueue queue];

  All return a new, auto-released instance, as you might expect.
• Added Foundation.h imports to headers to allow ASIHTTPRequest to be built as part of a static library (Thanks to Steven Osborn for this!)
• Added useHTTPVersionOne property to force the use of HTTP 1.0 instead of 1.1 (Thanks to Basil Shkara!)
• NetworkRequestErrorDomain is now exported so you can compare it against the domain of errors generated by ASIHTTPRequest (Thanks to Roger Nolan for this!)
• Code cleanup - many properties are now declared inside ASIHTTPRequest.m to keep them private. If I have made something private that you were previously relying on, please let me know!
• Renamed outputStream to fileDownloadOutputStream for clarity

v0.97 16th May 2009

ASINetworkQueues no longer hijack the delegates of requests you add to them.

This means:

• Delegates you set on requests will have their requestDidFinishSelectors and requestDidFailSelectors called when they are run from a queue.
• You can now set downloadProgressDelegates and uploadProgressDelegates on requests you add to a queue, and these will be called when progress changes. The download progress queue example in the Mac sample application has been updated to demonstrate this: You can now have a progress indicator per request *and* an overall progress indicator for the queue.

See also the updated documentation on progress tracking.

Thanks to Serge Huber for pointing out this issue on his blog, I have no idea why I didn't implement it like this to begin with... :)

The marvelous GHUnit is now included with ASIHTTPRequest, so running the tests should be as easy as choosing the test target.

This release also has a couple of tweaks to the tests, and a fix to prevent the Content-length header from being added to requests without a body, which could cause issues with some servers (eg lighty). Thanks once again to Roman Busyghin for contributing this patch.

Finally, I've updated the documentation to clarify a few things, including

• Added a note about why you probably don't want to use synchronous requests
• Added a note about using NTLM authentication
• Added a note about using delegation to provide authentication credentials
• Tweaked the explanation of progress tracking, as noted above

v0.96 5th April 2009

Another big update:

• ASIHTTPRequest can now stream the request body directly from disk. This should result in a big drop in memory use for large posts (which is especially great news for iPhone). More info here. Thanks to Neil Martin for his bug report!
• Fixed some issues with multiple requests in an ASINetworkQueue when accurate progress was off
• Added a couple of new tests
• Fixed a couple of bugs in the tests
• Some code restructuring, more comments
• Fixed an issue with cookies being re-encoded each time they were added to the headers. Thanks to Richard Caetano for reporting this problem!
• Fix two memory leaks, my thanks to Max Horváth for finding them, and also thanks to Max for suggesting the new Lighthouse issue tracker!

v0.951 22nd March 2009

• Giant file layout cleanup. I've split the Mac and iPhone targets into two XCode projects, which should mean a) it ought to work with the new SDK, and b) I should stop running into all those quirky bugs XCode has when changing to a target with a different SDK.
• Requests and ASINetworkQueues now include the amount of data already downloaded in progress display when resuming a file download. Also, a you can now call [request removeTemporaryDownloadFile] to remove partial downloads. This is only necessary if a request does not complete successfully. (If you didn't specify your own custom temporaryFileDownloadPath, ASIHTTPRequest stores this file in a temporary folder anyway, so it will probably be cleaned up in the fullness of time.) Thanks to Matt Coneybeare for these requests.
• Added userInfo NSDictionary to ASIHTTPRequest. You can this to store context-specific data that's related to a particular request without subclassing, much like many of the Apple-supplied classes. Thanks to Roman Busyghin for this patch.

v0.94 16th March 2009

ASIHTTPRequest now supports resuming cancelled or interrupted file downloads. More information here.

Thanks to Matt Coneybeare for this feature request!

v0.93 12th March 2009

• NTLM authentication should now be possible. I've made various structural changes to the authentication retry process to make this work. An NTLM test is also included, but you'll need to add your own server details if you want to run this test. I'm very grateful to Justim Odendaal for providing me with access to a test server to get this working.
• Fixed a small issue with the testRequestMethod test, and a nasty crasher that was triggered if you tried to upload to an invalid host when tracking upload progress. Many thanks to Michael Krause for contributing these fixes and the associated test!
• handleBytesAvailable now uses a larger buffer size when the Content-Length header is set and the size of the body is larger than 64KB, hopefully this should improve download performance. Thanks to Matt Coneybeare for highlighting this!
• Fixed a leak with setting responseHeaders