We host a website with some videos, and we're aiming to restrict these videos so only an specific referer can access to them. We were using secdownload, but seems to be a pain with HTTP Live Streaming.
In our iPhone APP, we're trying to customize the HTTP Header fields by setting our custom referer or user-agent and be able to play this videos.
We customize it this way
NSMutableURLRequest *theRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:self.UrlString]];
[theRequest setValue: customreferer forHTTPHeaderField:#"Referer"];
If we start a connection (NSConnection) everything is fine, but the problem comes when using with MPMoviePlayerController, because it seems that there is no way to customize its http requests.
You can specify an NSURL in MPMoviePlayerController, but doesn't seem to allow you to edit the request.
Am I missing something? If so, how do we achieve this? We're outputting the log from apache and all the HTTP requests made by the movieplayer have an empty referer.
That is correct. To use a MPMoviePlayerController with a different URL, you should release the original and alloc/initWithContentURL: a new one. You could consider adding a parameter to the URL, or customise the URL in some other way, to identify the referrer.
But I am aware of no way of getting at the NSURLRequest.
Related
I want to stream audio file from a source that needs OAuth2 authentication, this is my code, but it is not working.
NSMutableURLRequest *req = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[req setValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"Bearer %#", accessToken] forHTTPHeaderField:#"Authorization"];
player = [AVPlayer playerWithURL:req.URL];
[player play];
Can you please help?
The issue is that you're adding your authentication token as an HTTP header, but then making a request using only the URL (and headers are not included in the URL).
I need to do a similar thing in my app, but it doesn't look like it's possible to interfere with AVPlayer's network request (at least, not with a public API). So now I'm looking at either requesting the file myself using NSURLSession (which means no streaming - gotta wait for the whole file, or else do some complicated processing to hand it off to an audio player in chunks), or else fudge the web service to accept my parameter as a query parameter instead of as an HTTP header.
This question also has some potential work-arounds: Send headers with AVPlayer request in 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
In my iOS app, I'm using a UIWebView and a custom protocol (with my own NSURLProtocol implementation). I've been fairly careful about making sure that whenever I load a url, I load something like this into my UIWebView:
myprotocol://myserver/mypath
and in my NSURLProtocol implementation, I take a mutable copy of the NSURLRequest, convert the URL to http: and send that to my server.
Everything works for HTTP GET requests. The problem I encounter is with POST requests. It seems like the UIWebView doesn't properly encode the form data in the HTTPBody if the request uses my custom protocol.
One work-around, since I'm using HTTPS for my server requests, is that I register my protocol handler to intercept http: instead of myprotocol: and I can convert all calls to https: This other question, here, pointed me toward that solution:
But I'm wondering if there's any alternative and/or better way of accomplishing what I want.
Instead of trying to use POST requests, one work around is to continue using GET requests for myprotocol:// URLs, but transform them in your NSURLProtocol implementation to an http:// and POST request to your server using the request query string as the body of the POST.
The worry with using GET requests to send large amounts of data is that somewhere along the request chain, the request line might get truncated. This appears to not be a problem, however, with locally-implemented protocols.
I wrote a short Cordova test app to experiment and I found that I was able to send through a little over 1 MiB of data without trouble to the HTTP request echoing service http://http-echo.jgate.de/
Here is my startLoading implementation:
- (void)startLoading {
NSURL *url = [[self request] URL];
NSString *query = [url query];
// Create a copy of `url` without the query string.
url = [[[NSURL alloc] initWithScheme:#"http" host:#"http-echo.jgate.de" path:[url path]] autorelease];
NSMutableURLRequest *newRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[newRequest setHTTPMethod:#"POST"];
[newRequest setAllHTTPHeaderFields:[[self request] allHTTPHeaderFields]];
[newRequest addValue:#"close" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Connection"];
[newRequest addValue:#"application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Content-Type"];
[newRequest setHTTPBody:[query dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
urlConnection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:newRequest delegate:self];
if (urlConnection) {
receivedData = [[NSMutableData data] retain];
}
}
I then implemented the NSURLConnection protocol methods to forward to the appropriate NSURLProtocolClient method, but building up the response data in the case of Transfer-Encoding:chunked (as is the case for responses from http://http-echo.jgate.de/).
Unfortunately it looks like that http: and https: scheme requests are handled slightly differently than other (including custom) schemes by Foundation Framework. Obviously HTTPBody and HTTPBodyStream calls on relevant NSURLRequest returns always nil for former ones. This is decided already prior call of [NSURLProtocol canInitWithRequest] therefore custom NSURLProtocol implementation has no way of influencing that (it is too late).
It seems that different NSURLRequest class is used for http: and https: than 'a default one'. Default GnuStep implementation of this class returns always nil from HTTPBody and HTTPBodyStream calls. Therefore particular implementations (e.g. one under PhoneGap, likely part of Foundation Framework) choose NSURLRequest-type of class based on scheme prior consulting that with NSURLProtocol. For custom schemes, you get NSURLRequest that returns nil for both HTTPBody and HTTPBodyStream which effectively disables use of POST method (and other methods with body) in custom URI scheme handler.
Maybe there is a way how to influence decision of which NSURLRequest class is actually used but it is currently unknown to me.
As a workaround, you can still use http: or https: scheme and decide in [NSURLProtocol canInitWithRequest] based on other criteria (e.g. host name).
I am wondering what the difference between Get and Post with asihttprequest library..
Is this a GET?
- (IBAction)sendHttpsRequest
{
//Set request address
NSMutableString *databaseURL = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:#"https://142.198.16.35"];
//call ASIHTTP delegates (Used to connect to database)
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:databaseURL];
//This sets up all other request
ASIFormDataRequest *request = [ASIFormDataRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request startAsynchronous];
}
is a post when you try to set elements say within a php document? any examples would be awesome!
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/methods.html
An HTTP GET is a request from the client to the server, asking for a resource.
An HTTP POST is an upload of data (form information, image data, whatever) from the client to the server.
What you have there is an HTTP POST.
-EDIT:
Per http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/:
ASIFormDataRequest
A subclass of ASIHTTPRequest that handles x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data posts. It makes POSTing data and files easy, but you do not need to add this to your project if you want to manage POST data yourself or don’t need to POST data at all.
My bad, this one was a POST, not a GET. The rest of my answer was valid, though :)
That is a POST request, which is the default for ASIFormDataRequest. The difference is the same as it would be in a normal HTTP request. You can read about that here if you don't already know.
In general, if you are just downloading a web page and do not need to send any variables to the server, a GET request is sufficient. If you want to send variables in your request, often times a POST request is the way to go since it is a bit more secure and less transparent.
I'm looking for a solution for reading the http status code with a UIWebView.
I have found this page on the topic How do I get the last HTTP Status Code from a UIWebView? but i cannot use AsiHttpRequest in my case.
Si I was wondering if somebody have found a solution since 2009, and if something similar to NSLog(#"Status code = %#",[webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:#"document.status"]);
could possibly work.
Thanks,
I don't think you can get it from the UIWebView, but I think it would work to have the result of an HTTP request put into an NSString, then parse the status code out of the header part of that string, thing feed that string to a UIWebView.
See the NSURL Class Reference and the URL Loading Programming Guide.
A possible alternative would be to implement an HTTP proxy directly inside your App, then feed a localhost URL to UIWebView. Your proxy would just make an HTTP connection with the web server and sit passively by while UIWebView drives the HTTP protocol. You then snoop on the incoming data before passing it on to UIWebView from your proxy. That would avoid the need to buffer the whole page in an NSString before feeding it to your UIWebView.