How to stop a DispatchWorkItem in GCD?
GCD does not perform preemptive cancelations. So, to stop a work item that has already started, you have to test for cancelations yourself. In Swift, cancel
the DispatchWorkItem
. In Objective-C, call dispatch_block_cancel
on the block you created with dispatch_block_create
. You can then test to see if was canceled or not with isCancelled
in Swift (known as dispatch_block_testcancel
in Objective-C).
func testDispatchItems() { let queue = DispatchQueue.global() var item: DispatchWorkItem? // create work item item = DispatchWorkItem { [weak self] in for i in 0 ... 10_000_000 { if item?.isCancelled ?? true { break } print(i) self?.heavyWork() } item = nil // resolve strong reference cycle of the `DispatchWorkItem` } // start it queue.async(execute: item!) // after five seconds, stop it if it hasn't already queue.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 5) { item?.cancel() item = nil }}
Or, in Objective-C:
- (void)testDispatchItem { dispatch_queue_t queue = dispatch_get_global_queue(QOS_CLASS_DEFAULT, 0); static dispatch_block_t block = nil; // either static or property __weak typeof(self) weakSelf = self; block = dispatch_block_create(0, ^{ for (long i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) { if (dispatch_block_testcancel(block)) { break; } NSLog(@"%ld", i); [weakSelf heavyWork]; } block = nil; }); // start it dispatch_async(queue, block); // after five seconds, stop it if it hasn't already dispatch_after(dispatch_time(DISPATCH_TIME_NOW, (int64_t)(5 * NSEC_PER_SEC)), dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ if (block) { dispatch_block_cancel(block); } });}
There is no asynchronous API where calling a "Cancel" method will cancel a running operation. In every single case, a "Cancel" method will do something so the operation can find out whether it is cancelled, and the operation must check this from time to time and then stop doing more work by itself.
I don't know the API in question, but typically it would be something like
for i in 0...10000000 { if (self?.cancelled) break; print(i) self?.heavyWork() }