Programmatically Pausing an NSTimer: A Step-by-Step Guide
NSTimer is a powerful tool for scheduling recurring tasks in your iOS application. But what happens when you need to temporarily pause the timer? This is where the pause() method comes in. In this article, we will explore how to programmatically pause an NSTimer in a step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Creating an NSTimer
First, we need to create an instance of NSTimer and specify the time interval for the timer to fire. Let's say we want our timer to fire every 2 seconds. We can define our timer like this:
<code><pre><span class="nt"><code></span> <span class="nc">NSTimer</span><span class="p">*</span><span class="n">timer</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="nb">NSTimer</span><span class="p">*</span><span class="nc">scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="nb">target</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">self</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="nb">selector</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">#selector(timerFired)</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="nb">userInfo</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="nb">nil</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="nb">repeats</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">true</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="p">;</span> <span class="nt"></code></span></pre></code>
Here, we are creating an NSTimer that will call the timerFired method every 2 seconds, and it will continue to fire until we manually stop it.
Step 2: Pausing the Timer
Now let's look at how we can pause the timer using the pause() method. This method is available in the NSRunLoop class, so we need to access it through our timer instance. Here's how we can do that:
<code><pre><span class="nt"><code></span> <span class="n">timer</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">pause</span><span class="p">()</span> <span class="p">;</span> <span class="nt"></code></span></pre></code>
This will pause the timer and prevent it from firing until we resume it.
Step 3: Resuming the Timer
To resume the timer, we need to call the resume() method on our timer instance. This will allow the timer to start firing again at the specified time interval. Here's how we can resume our timer:
