Check Network Resources Before Use
Using Facebook-connect for iPhone SDK to post stories to Facebook is a great feature to add to your iPhone application. But what happens if the user has no access to the network? If you don’t check the network, the answer is nothing. This leads to user confusion, and it will prevent your app from being approved for the App Store.
So, how do you check? Apple provided a sample application called Reachability which provides the answer. I’ll demonstrate here. In several blog posts people felt that the Reachability sample was overkill for their needs. If you agree, here’s a link to a recipe from The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook that provides an alternate solution. Even if you don’t plan on using it, I recommend reading through the code in the Reachability example.
Project Setup
In an earlier post I used the Facebook-Connect for iPhone SDK to post stories to Facebook. I’ll use the same project to demonstrate how to check that Facebook is reachable. Here’s the project with the API Keys and Template Bundle IDs removed. fbconnect-iphone.zip I’ll include a link to the final project at the end.Download the Reachability project too. I’ll be importing a class from it to check the network connection status.
