Showing a progress HUD

Overview

In mobile apps, it's helpful to give the user an indication that content is being loaded while the app sends a network request to get new data. A common method is to use a Progress HUD (Heads Up Display) while fetching the data. We can use CocoaPods to install a library that provides us with a convenient way to show a loading indicator while our network request is pending.

Sample Progress HUD

Setting Up the Podfile

We'll start by doing pod init to create a template Podfile. It should contain some lines at the top similar to the below:

# Uncomment the next line to define a global platform for your project
# platform :ios, "9.0"
...
use_frameworks!

This tells CocoaPods that your project will be using frameworks instead of static libraries heading toward a more complex Podfile that works with Swift.

You could also include the line below to supress any warnings from Pods we install if you're getting a lot of noise from them:

inhibit_all_warnings!

Installing the Pod

Next navigate to the CocoaPods website where they have a directory of different PodSpecs.

A quick search for "Progress" or "Loading" finds us a few different Pods we could use, in this case we're going to install MBProgressHUD.

Edit your Podfile to include the new Pod we found:

pod 'MBProgressHUD'

Notice that since we did not specify a target platform, CocoaPods will infer this from what was already defined in our project. Then we download the package and incorporate it into our project with the following commands in the Terminal:

pod install && open *.xcworkspace

Tip: the above is a shorthand to load up your new workspace in one line.

Adding the Progress HUD

Finally we update our View Controller to display the progress HUD while our network request is pending and dismiss the HUD once we receive a response.

NOTE: The below code shows the implementation of the Progress HUD in a sample network request. If your aim is to add the Progress HUD to an existing network request already in your project, you will only need to add MBProgressHUD.showAdded(to: self.view, animated: true) at the beginning of the request and MBProgressHUD.hide(for: self.view, animated: true) in the completion handler

import UIKit
import MBProgressHUD

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    // ...

    func loadDataFromNetwork() {

        // ... Create the NSURLRequest (myRequest) ...

        // Configure session so that completion handler is executed on main UI thread
        let session = NSURLSession(
            configuration: NSURLSessionConfiguration.defaultSessionConfiguration(),
            delegate:nil,
            delegateQueue:NSOperationQueue.mainQueue()
        )

        // Display HUD right before the request is made
        MBProgressHUD.showAdded(to: self.view, animated: true)

        let task : NSURLSessionDataTask = session.dataTaskWithRequest(myRequest,
            completionHandler: { (data, response, error) in
            
            // Hide HUD once the network request comes back (must be done on main UI thread)
            MBProgressHUD.hide(for: self.view, animated: true)
            
            // ... Remainder of response handling code ...

        });
        task.resume()
    }
}