iOS developer

I wanted to touch back to my blog from yesterday. Staying true to my previous statement the every time I think I truly understand it I soon find out that I really don't, today I found out that my design for connection did not hold a stable connection. After going back down the rabbit hole for many hours, I was finally able to create a connection that was stable. 

One big issue I saw reoccurring today was that peers would stop advertising to no reason, and this would cause their connection to the session to be lost, and would cause a domino effect of peers losing their connections. This would not be a catastrophe if I could find a sound way to reconnect the peers, but finding this solution is proving to be difficult. 

After losing connection I had peers resend invitations to all connect peers, who should be only accepting the invitationHandler, but the connection was never made. From the articles I have read, as well what I have seen happening in my logs, only one user can send an invitation and one user accept it. 

Using this belief i setup the logic so that when two peers meet, they are both advertising, but it takes an action of hitting a button for one user to send an invite for the session connection, and the other user is programmatically accepting this invite. After the session is established I make it so that the peer who initiated the connection is now what I refer to as the "Inviter", and all other peers are what I call the "Accepters". Basically my Inviter sends an invitation to every peer it detects advertising, and once another peer picks up the invitation they accept it automatically, and are set so they cannot invite any other peers. Since all peers are connected through the Inviter they are all therefore connected to the same session. 

Now this very logic of them all being connected to the same session may be the reasoning behind the fact that I cannot reconnect after a connection is lost. I may need to tear down, and reset the entire session. This would be very bothersome, and seems unnecessary. I hope I am incorrect about this, but I am having a lot of trouble reconnecting peers. For the purpose of our demo on Thursday I believe using my current method will work, but in real world practice it is necessary for me to solve this issue. 

Over the past eight weeks I have been enrolled in a developer bootcamp called Mobile Makers, based in Chicago, Illinois, which focuses on learning how to become an iOS developer. On the first day of the program we were told it would be beneficial for us to create a blog, following that advice I setup this account, and seeing as this is my first post, I did not do a very good job of following through. Well now is as good as anytime to correct that mistake. 

As I sit here at 5:45AM on Tuesday, I have not been able to sleep more than two hours tonight (please excuse any typos as I haven't slept much in about a week) because Thursday is our graduation which involves us presenting our final projects to the general public. There will be friends, family, employment recruiters, business owners, etc. coming to see what we have created. This project has been our sole focus for the past three weeks and as any Developer would understand creating an App Store worthy app in three weeks is not a long time frame. This is to be our major project to show to employers, that should show our abilities and what we know. 

For my group's project we decided to make an app called PubChat. This app essentially is a local chat application that enables chat between users within a close proximity. We chose this because we wanted to use iBeacon tech, and ended up using Multipeer Connectivity. For anyone wanting to use Multipeer Connectivity, let me forewarn you it is quite frustrating and just when you think you have a good understanding of how it works, something happens that just destroys your understanding, and you go back to watch the WWDC video for the 20th time. 

Being the ambitious person that I am, I decided I would take on Multipeer Connectivity and use it to get our chat to work. At first I thought this would be finished week one, well as you already know I was dead wrong in that assumption. Giving myself some credit I did have a version that worked well enough to demo at the end of week one, but to make the tech work how we wanted it I needed to trash the MCBrowser provided by Apple, and create my own browser using MCNearbyServiceBrowser. Once I went down that path was when I truly realized I had no idea how this tech truly worked. After much trial and error, as well as many,many hours of beating my head against the wall I believe I have finally devised solid logic to create a stable connection. At a high level this seems like a fairly simple undertaking, well in reality it is quite complex. My latest issue has been how to create a lasting connection by inviting and accepting the invitationHandler programmatically. The real issue here was that for a stable two way connection only one peer can send an invitation and the other peer has to accept that invitationHandler. Also when dealing with more than two peers this required working it so that only one peer sent out the invitation to either one other peer, or all other peers they find advertising. The documentation for this is quite sparse, and all of the resources I found online did not seem to have the desired effect for me. 

As I have already mentioned I believe I have devised the logic that will keep sustainable, lasting connections. How I achieved this was by assigning a BOOL that when initialized is set to YES. Upon receiving an invitation this BOOL is set to NO. Now I evaluate this BOOL in the MCNearbyServiceBrowser method of foundPeer: withDiscoveryInformation, where when I find an advertising peer if the BOOL is set to YES I send an invitation, otherwise I do not send an invitation. After evaluating the BOOL I set it to NO so the user can only send one invitation once they start browsing. Now once the peer's session.connectedPeers array is equal to 0 I reset this BOOL so that the peer can invite another peer. Now on the other end I have the peer always accept any invitation they receive. This can be used to connect all users advertising in a region because all peers connected to the same peer are connected as well. So this creates a spider web effect of sorts.