Is there a way to make drawRect work right NOW?

If I understand your question correctly, there is a simple solution to this. During your long-running routine you need to tell the current runloop to process for a single iteration (or more, of the runloop) at certain points in your own processing. e.g, when you want to update the display. Any views with dirty update regions will have their drawRect: methods called when you run the runloop.

To tell the current runloop to process for one iteration (and then return to you…):

[[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] runMode: NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate: [NSDate date]];

Here’s an example of an (inefficient) long running routine with a corresponding drawRect – each in the context of a custom UIView:

- (void) longRunningRoutine:(id)sender
{
    srand( time( NULL ) );

    CGFloat x = 0;
    CGFloat y = 0;

    [_path moveToPoint: CGPointMake(0, 0)];

    for ( int j = 0 ; j < 1000 ; j++ )
    {
        x = 0;
        y = (CGFloat)(rand() % (int)self.bounds.size.height);

        [_path addLineToPoint: CGPointMake( x, y)];

        y = 0;
        x = (CGFloat)(rand() % (int)self.bounds.size.width);

        [_path addLineToPoint: CGPointMake( x, y)];

        x = self.bounds.size.width;
        y = (CGFloat)(rand() % (int)self.bounds.size.height);

        [_path addLineToPoint: CGPointMake( x, y)];

        y = self.bounds.size.height;
        x = (CGFloat)(rand() % (int)self.bounds.size.width);

        [_path addLineToPoint: CGPointMake( x, y)];

        [self setNeedsDisplay];
        [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] runMode: NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate: [NSDate date]];
    }

    [_path removeAllPoints];
}

- (void) drawRect:(CGRect)rect
{
    CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();

    CGContextSetFillColorWithColor( ctx, [UIColor blueColor].CGColor );

    CGContextFillRect( ctx,  rect);

    CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor( ctx, [UIColor whiteColor].CGColor );

    [_path stroke];
}

And here is a fully working sample demonstrating this technique.

With some tweaking you can probably adjust this to make the rest of the UI (i.e. user-input) responsive as well.

Update (caveat for using this technique)

I just want to say that I agree with much of the feedback from others here saying this solution (calling runMode: to force a call to drawRect:) isn’t necessarily a great idea. I’ve answered this question with what I feel is a factual “here’s how” answer to the stated question, and I am not intending to promote this as “correct” architecture. Also, I’m not saying there might not be other (better?) ways to achieve the same effect – certainly there may be other approaches that I wasn’t aware of.

Update (response to the Joe’s sample code and performance question)

The performance slowdown you’re seeing is the overhead of running the runloop on each iteration of your drawing code, which includes rendering the layer to the screen as well as all of the other processing the runloop does such as input gathering and processing.

One option might be to invoke the runloop less frequently.

Another option might be to optimize your drawing code. As it stands (and I don’t know if this is your actual app, or just your sample…) there are a handful of things you could do to make it faster. The first thing I would do is move all the UIGraphicsGet/Save/Restore code outside the loop.

From an architectural standpoint however, I would highly recommend considering some of the other approaches mentioned here. I see no reason why you can’t structure your drawing to happen on a background thread (algorithm unchanged), and use a timer or other mechanism to signal the main thread to update it’s UI on some frequency until the drawing is complete. I think most of the folks who’ve participated in the discussion would agree that this would be the “correct” approach.