Simple Remote Requests with Titanium Appcelerator

Titanium Appcelerator is a pretty nifty tool. Here’s a small data manager object that looked after my external requests.

I was tinkering with Appcelerator recently, and came upon the need to build a data manager to shoot off requests in a bit of a “fire-and-forget” sort of way. I created this global object I could channel requests into. My particular server always replied with JSON, so you can tweak this for whatever data your remote server will return.

var DataManager = {
    send: function(toWhere, data, callback, context)
    {
        // Fail
            if (!toWhere) {
            return false;
        }
        
        // Defaults
        data     = data     || {}; // The data to send to the server
        callback = callback || function(_r) { return _r; }; // The callback. If none is supplied, will just return the result
        context  = context  || null; // The object that 'this' will refer to in the callback
        
        if (Ti.Network.online) {
            var XHR = Ti.Network.createHTTPClient({
                onload: function() {
                    var result = JSON.parse(this.responseText);
                    
                    return callback.apply(context, [result]);
                },
                onerror: function() {
                    var result = JSON.parse(this.responseText);
                    alert('There was an error with the connection. Please try again later.');
                
                    return result;
                }
            });
        
            XHR.setTimeout(15000); // 15s is my timeout. Use your own here
            
            XHR.open('POST', 'http://example.com/' + toWhere, false);
            XHR.send(data);
        } else {
            // Handle offline here
            alert('You are offline');
        }
    }
};

var DataManager = {

send: function(toWhere, data, callback, context)

{

// Fail

if (!toWhere) {

return false;

}

// Defaults

data = data || {}; // The data to send to the server

callback = callback || function(_r) { return _r; }; // The callback. If none is supplied, will just return the result

context = context || null; // The object that 'this' will refer to in the callback

if (Ti.Network.online) {

var XHR = Ti.Network.createHTTPClient({

onload: function() {

var result = JSON.parse(this.responseText);

return callback.apply(context, [result]);

onerror: function() {

var result = JSON.parse(this.responseText);

alert('There was an error with the connection. Please try again later.');

return result;

}

});

XHR.setTimeout(15000); // 15s is my timeout. Use your own here

XHR.open('POST', 'http://example.com/' + toWhere, false);

XHR.send(data);

} else {

// Handle offline here

alert('You are offline');

}

};

Using this object in the global scope, you can just type:

DataManager.send('user/new', { myVar: 'some value' }, this.processXHR(), this);

1	DataManager.send('user/new', { myVar: 'some value' }, this.processXHR(), this);

Appcelerator has sped up development in key areas tremendously, but at the cost of some flexibility and code bloat. It’s worth keeping an eye on, as each release is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor.