Unable to post byte array to webservices (REST) in iOS - iphone

I am developing an application which requiers me to convert an audio/video/image file into a 'BYTE ARRAY' and upload that to web services(REST) through a POST request. I am actually using ASIHTTPRequest (ASIFormData) to POST the data. But I could not find any class/method which will allow me to post the byteArray. Is there a way to do this....?

You can post any data with ASIFormDataRequest's setData. Here's an example.

You could create an NSData out of your bytes, and set that to the request using setData:.
NSData Class Reference

Related

Sending data to a website and getting results of search iOS

I am very new to iOS and I've just begun reading about HTTP requests and POST and GET methods. Let's say, for example, I want to have the user input a string, and then send that data to a website, (for this example, say www.rhymezone.com), search with that string, and get the results of that search within my application. Is this done with an HTTP post method? Or what? Any help / examples would be greatly appreciated. Also, if there are tutorials for this stuff, that would be appreciated as well.
For sake of example, here is what I've tried:
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=test&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&org3=y"]];
NSURLConnection *connection = [NSURLConnection connectionWithRequest:request delegate:self];
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data
{
NSString *dataAsString=[[NSString alloc]initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSLog(#"data: %#",dataAsString);
}
This outputs the entire source of the website (searching for rhymes of the word test). While I can certainly write a method to go through the source of the website and extract the words it returns, I feel like this is not correct. My way of getting rhymes of different words is simply to change the URL here, so where it says 'test' I change it to whatever the user inputs.
Thanks
Look into AFNetworking and RestKit.
It's easiest if you're calling a public API that uses JSON/XML, and then use a built in parser or a parser library to extract the data you want.
Simply downloading the contents of a URL is an HTTP GET request, such as going to a website.
This link talks a bit more about the difference between GET and POST.
When do you use POST and when do you use GET?
If I understand correctly what you are trying to do, I fear that the only option for you is sending the HTTP request (GET or POST according to what the website expects, just like you are doing) and then parse the result to filter all the information that is not relevant.
An alternative approach would be possible if you were using a website offering a REST API, or a JSON API so that you send the query and you get back just the information you need (in a specific format).
So, it depends strongly on the website you are using, but for the generic case, the only option you have is parsing.
(Or, you could display the full content of the page through UIWebView. This would not require explicitly setting up a connection, but I am not sure it is what you are trying to do.)
You are looking for a way to communicate with your website from your iOS application. The common approach is to get the string entered by the user, encode and send it as http request to a sort of script (webservice). This script will do all the stuff you want (search with this string). Then re-send the result to the client (your iOS app) as a http response which will be parsed in your iOS app(with a JSON parser for instance).
There is good resources around that, as an example, you may read this: http://www.raywenderlich.com/2965/how-to-write-an-ios-app-that-uses-a-web-service

Formatting an array into JSON

I am working on an iPhone application. I have to send a POST request to a server in the JSON format. I found the following question: How would I send my array over a HTTP POST to the server?, with good comments suggesting the following URL had a solution: http://andyj.be.s79833.gridserver.com/blog/?p=65
However, this URL now no longer exists. Please provide me any help for posting JSON format data in the form of an associative array or provide any other help.
If you are targeting iOS 5.0, you can use Apple's NSJSONSerialization class to turn an NSArray into a JSON string.

Objective-C and TBXML: How to accept mime-type "application/xml" with TBXML?

The TBXML documentation is pretty small and the API didn't give me any hints as how I should define how to accept mime-type "application/xml" with TBXML, as I'm requesting data from a webservice that serves HTML as default but can serve XML if requested (and I need the XML).
Is there some way to do this with the API? Or is there a workaround? I didn't try any request processing with iOS SDK so far, so maybe there's an obvious answer I just don't see.
If you open TBXML source code, you'll see that initWithURL is defined as ...
- (id)initWithURL:(NSURL*)aURL {
self = [self initWithXMLString:[NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:aURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil]];
... and there's no way how to say that you want to receive XML.
You should look at NSMutableURLRequest, NSURLConnection and download it by yourself. You can set HTTP header field Accept in NSMutableURLRequest and then you can use this request in NSURLConnection to download it.

upload small thumbnail images from iPhone app to Amazon S3

I noticed couple thread on this already and they even provided sample code.
http://brunofuster.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/uploading-an-image-from-iphone-with-uiimagepicker-and-asihttprequests3/
But what baffled me is that - there was no response to get handled? is it because that s3 doesn't return any response? I am expecting to receive at least an URL to the image on S3, how could I get that?
If you look at the S3 REST object PUT documentation you will see the response that is returned from S3.
When you post to S3 you know the bucket name you are putting the image into plus you know the filename. These two pieces of information should be all you need to get a url to the image.
The documentation states that in addition to the PUT response header(s) you can see some of the common headers too.
This implementation of the operation
can include the following response
headers in addition to the response
headers common to all responses. For
more information, see Common Response
Headers.
If you look at the ASIHTTPRequest Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) support you will see how to get a response from the ASIS3ObjectRequest object.
Tom,
If you wish to just get your S3 image url, you don't need the response information considering you already know the image name and the bucket (if there was no error).
Anyway, you can get the response from a sync request by using [request responseString|responseData].
But the right thing to do is an async call using operation queues and delegates to get the response success or error. My blog post just provided a minimal sample. I will look into that and improve the post itself.
Thanks!
In addition to the answers already provided, you might also want to look at Amazon's recently released AWS SDK for iOS, which includes sample code for uploading images, etc. to S3.

post xml from iphone to server

How can I post XML data format to server?
(I only know post paramters to server)
Thank you!
It will depend on the server. You could get the NSData -bytes representation of the XML data and, if you're working with a RESTful web application, use PUT or POST when sending the data.