Right design/code approach to call a method every N hours

[Jume]

Hi there,

I have a small utility app that's syncing some data from my server. I have a sync method and I would like my app calls this method automatically at certain time on a day.

What is best approach to this? I know I could deploy a timer or something but I don't know if this is the right way of doing this kind of thing...? I want the method to be executed every day at 6AM and 6PM and maybe in future every 4 hours or so...

Any tips and pointers to the right place in ADC documentation would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jume

[mnemonic_fx]

You might want to look at the usage of NSTimer method:

- (id)initWithFireDate:(NSDate *)date interval:(NSTimeInterval)seconds target:(id)target selector:(SEL)aSelector userInfo:(id)userInfo repeats:(BOOL)repeats

It will fire at a given date, just calculate the date, add the timer to the run loop.

[Jume]

Originally Posted by mnemonic_fx

You might want to look at the usage of NSTimer method:

- (id)initWithFireDate:(NSDate *)date interval:(NSTimeInterval)seconds target:(id)target selector:(SEL)aSelector userInfo:(id)userInfo repeats:(BOOL)repeats

It will fire at a given date, just calculate the date, add the timer to the run loop.

so is this a good practice to have this timer running at all time and waiting to the right hour to come?

[mnemonic_fx]

Originally Posted by Jume

so is this a good practice to have this timer running at all time and waiting to the right hour to come?

I can't see why it's a bad practice.

I observe that there're Time Manager functions inside CoreServices framework, but all of it has been deprecated since Mac OS X 10.4, so they advise to use Carbon Event Loop or NSTimer.

My understanding of NSTimer is it will run based on the schedule of the main application event loop, so I don't think it's something that will consume lots of resources, besides the fact that you're doing this on the desktop.

[Jume]

Ok thanks. I will take a look at above timer function.

I was thinking maybe it's better going with launchd scheduled agent which would run my sync utility app at the right time of the day.

BR
Jume

[mnemonic_fx]

Oh, well that might be better, that would mean launchd will launch your app automatically, and do those stuff.