I need to send a multipart/form-data HTTP POST request with a file and some extra data. The files might be kind of big, so I cannot read them with NSData because it will trigger a memory issue, so the file has to be read with NSInputStream.
I've been doing some research and found a solution for Objective-C: https://github.com/pyke369/PKMultipartInputStream
Is there something similar for Swift?
I wrote my custom NSInputStream subclass for uploading ALAseets. POSInputStreamLibrary has flexible enough architecture to reuse it for writing any streams you want. At least you can look at its sources to get an idea. The library is written with Objective-C, but I don't see any problem to use/rewrite it in Swift.
Related
I have to implement a file upload for my app. Files like Assets (which can be Photo or Video) should be uploaded to a web sever using a REST interface.
The upload would use a form data request with custom header attributes.
Problem:
Holding large files like Videos in an NSData object can lead to memory issues. This would be the standard approach.
Solution
Providing an NSInputStream for the body part of the request - and write data piece by piece to the HTTP Body Stream.
Question Can anyone provide an exmaple of how to use an NSInputStream in combination with a NSURLrequest and NSURLConnection?
I wrapped my head around several incomplete examples -
but I do not know how to deal with the following method
- (NSInputStream *)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection needNewBodyStream:(NSURLRequest *)request
I don't want to use any third party library.
I know you don't want to use any third party library but you could maybe use them as a reference to see how to perform such tasks ?
You could maybe take a look at AFNetworking code to see how Mattt achieved such kind of things.
I'd also suggest using Sessions, that are more documented and robust (if the targeted platform makes it available)
If a iphone app needs to communicate with a server, is xml the best route in most cases?
how hard is it to parse xml in obj-c?
It really depends on the type of data you wish to exchange, but XML will at the very least be able to handle any complexity of data structure you require. (If you only want to exchange a minimal amount of information, you might want to consider JSON that said.)
There are quite a few XML parsers available for Objective-C, most of which are discussed on this existing question: Navigating XML from Objective-C
Finally, there's a great blog post on Ray Wenderlich's web site that discusses the various XML parsers with a view to speed/memory footprint which might be important if you're parsing a large amount of data.
Depends on what is beeing transmitted.
That said I use JSON for 90% of my server to app communication. Easy to parse as libraries are readily available.
Nope. Not hard. But when it comes to APIs it seems many prefer JSON.
JSON is easier to work with than XML, regardless of parser used. Lots of server side people will understand JSON quite well because of the need to use it to work with Javascript.
The iPhone JSON parser I'd look at using first is YAJL.
I would either go with XML or JSON ( http://www.json.org/ ).
It's very easy to parse XML on the iPhone. There are quite a few XML parsers out there based on your preference. For a DOM parser you can use TBXML, otherwise Apple's built-in NSXMLParser does the job.
I use JSON, which is a great (and popular) solution for your server as well. Try out SBJSON for a good obj c library:
http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/
I've looked at some of the apple core API stuff, as well as ASIHTTPRequest. It's made me curious - is there a simple way to just send a nonblocking request to a URL? I could do it what seems to be the standard way - make the request object, make a useless delegate object that just ignores the response, and that's how I've been doing it. I'm still pretty new to ObjC in general, so I was wondering if I missed out on something that could save me from writing all this boilerplate code.
If only I could run curl.
Use ASIHttpRequest for all connections. It is a CFNetwork wrapper that is much better than the default Apple NSUrlRequest
we were asked to develop an iphone app like the one in the figure.
The problem is: we have no experience in IOS development.
For the basic part I can handle the learning curve, but i need suggestions, best practices on the UIKit model and controls.
This is a newspaper app.
The accordion control shows/hides content based on categories retrieved by an ASP .NET CMS on which we have no control.
I can suggest to the CMS holder to develop a couple of web services (WCF) but i'm not sure how to interface iOS with MS technology.
Furthermore, i have the idea that simple aspx that returns XML/JSON data will be easier to call, and support, but slightly less secure.
So, suggestions? Tutorials?
If you like to use JSON and a very good HTTP-request-framework I have two links for you. Both sites contain various tutorials on how to use them.
json-framework
ASIHTTPRequest
Concerning the request and delegate stuff: For a start, I would skip the delegate part and use a synchronized HTTP request called in a thread (you'll see what that is on the second website). That makes the response handling a lot easier for the start. But I personally think, that using an asynchronous request is not a must. It's just nicer, if the architecture allows it. In my application, it wasn't realizable without lots of code overhead.
You want to output an XML feed in "plist" format (look it up, its simple theres lots of info on it).
Then you can do:
NSArray *plistContents = [NSArray arrayWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://theinternet.com/pathToMyPlist.asp"]];
That will get all the output into an array.
Some other resources you may find interesting/useful include NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection. For the latter you will have to learn about delegate methods and such - its complicated, but its incredibly useful information.
We did several applications here using XML parsing like what you're suggesting at the end of your question. If you are concerned about security, you can implement handshaking or other security measures over that.
EDIT: XML parsing done using NSURLConnection to gather the content and NSXMLParser/NSXMLParserDelegate to do the actual parsing.
EDIT2: There is an official sample, called SeismicXML from Apple. It should get you started with iPhone XML parsing and data downloading.
I know how to connect to web server using an iPhone but now I have to connect the iPhone to a web service. I don't know how to do it and there is no demo or class available online.
Does anyone have any ideas?
You might find this tutorial, called Intro to SOAP Web Services useful. He shows how to package a request, send it to a web service, and read the response.
If you need some help with XML parsing, there is the TouchXML library which will give you a nice xml "document" to work with. Just be cautious of memory usage.
If you have to parse large XML message this tutorial about libxml and xmlreader in Cocoa will show you how to parse XML with the lower-level event-style parsers.
I've created an open source application for iPhone OS 3.0 that shows how to use REST & SOAP services in iPhone application, using XML (using 8 different iPhone libraries), SOAP, JSON (using SBJSON and TouchJSON), YAML, Protocol Buffers (Google serialization format) and even CSV from a PHP sample app (included in the project).
http://github.com/akosma/iPhoneWebServicesClient
The project is modular enough to support many other formats and libraries in the future.
The following presentation in SlideShare shows my findings in terms of performance, ease of implementation and payload characteristics:
http://www.slideshare.net/akosma/web-services-3439269
You can use these 2 lines which return the response of your HTTP request. You don't need any configuration. This code is usefull if you try to access a PHP scritp for example. After you just have to parse your result.
NSURL *URL=[[NSURL alloc] initWithString:stringForURL];
NSString *results = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL :URL];
In my opinion, you have two options :
Use a third party library. You can try wsdl2objc. It didn't work for me, but it is under active development so it improves every day.
Use a raw HTTP connection and handle every request/response. This is the way I followed. It is hard, so I'd also like to know a better approach.