title: iPhone help on using XMLParser and UI while waiting for results
body: <p>can someone provide a little guidance on the best way to handle iPhone UI and processing  while parsing a SOAP message?  Here is the context:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I have an app that allows a user to select a car (from a list of cars) they are interested in viewing.</li>
  <li>When they pick a car, I push a carDetails viewcontroller that shows the car detail categories. When I initialize carDetails, I alloc/execute another class called getCarData that contains SOAP and XMLParser methods that retrieve and load all the car details from a web service.</li>
  <li>Currently, the getCarData class returns control back to carDetails before it has completed it's processing (I believe due to the asynchronous nature of the XMLParser)</li>
  <li>But I need data from getCarData to be loaded before I allow the user to select any drill-down category information in carDetails (i.e. Interior, Engine, etc.)  </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My questions are;</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>What is the best way to handle the wait process until the data is loaded?</li>
  <li>I have seen some forum questions on firing off separate threads so I don't tie up the UI, but I actually do want the user to wait (if necessary) until the data is loaded.  So should I create another thread?  Should I just simply display a progress window that hides the main window until data is loaded? </li>
  <li>What is the best way to check and see if the data has finished loading and if not, display  the activity/progress view?  In other words, should I handle it in the carDetails, getCarData, or maybe the AppDelegate? </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Sorry for the multiple questions and (probably) noob problems, but I can't seem to find many discussions or code examples that I can use.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance - Mike</p>