I am working on an application in which i write to an xml file and then send it through email and at the reciever end the receiver recives it in his/her inbox and download the file to the iphone and then open the same app on his phone and browse to this file and by clicking sync button the progra should parse the tags in the xml file.
Everything is cler but i am not sure whether we can download a file to our iphone and browse thru it our app.
Thanks, i appreciate. :)
No, I don't believe you can download a file from mail and pass it to your app to open and read. This would be for security reasons.
I think the only way to achieve this would be to not use an XML file, and instead construct a URL with parameters.
There are a few drawbacks here, though. Depending on how much data you need to pass, the url could get pretty large. You would have to take considerations to make sure that each parameter value is properly URL escaped. And you could have to write code to parse the data in the parameters.
This is how other apps pass data between apps, an example would be the iPhone's Phone app. You can make it call a number by using a tel:// URL.
You can register a URL scheme in your app and use it to pass data around.
Related
Is there a way to parse an XML which is attached to an e-mail directly from my app? I have implemented a parser which is reading it from the documents path, but would like to allow the user to be able to directly get it from an e-mail attachment too.
Assuming that you don't want to restrict it to jailbroken files, the easiest way is to register a filetype (Apple docs) with the extension of your data format, so XML if it is a generic XML or some other type if you want to make it specific to your application (and remember if you register XML you will get all XMLs, not just yours), then the user can click on the extension and get the 'Open in....' menu with your application shown in the list.
You need to impliment application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:, but it is all in the docs.
A better option would be to give it a filetype that is not commonly used by anything else, so that yours is the only one in the list. I get 4 apps on my iPad for opening XML
There is no way to automatically do it.
I need to code in authentication information for specific parts of my website into my app. Is it at all possible for the app to be "decompiled" and the username and password exposed?
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:#"https://predefinedUsername:predefinedPassword#www.website.com"];
Yes, it is possible. Assume that if you have anything compiled into your app, it can [and will] be discovered by someone somewhere. Even if it isn't possible today, you are creating a frozen record of such information that will be vulnerable to any future attacks, known or unknown.
You really need the user to perform some task that authenticates them. There are a million and one ways to do that, and for every one of those, a million and two ways to do it wrong. :)
Without knowing more about your specific requirements, it is impossible to really say much more outside of "keep it simple and don't store or send anything in clear-text".
As #Hyperbole said, If you store the username and password in plain text it will be visible in the executable. It is extremely trivial to examine the executable for strings, and it's usually the first thing someone with malicious intent will try.
Right click on any app you've downloaded in iTunes and select show in finder. Make a copy of the app on your desktop and rename the app from AppName.ipa to AppName.zip. Double-click to unzip it, and look inside the folder. Navigate to the folder Payload and then right click on the (probably only) file in there called AppName that looks like an application but has a big circle with a cross through it for the icon. Select show package contents. Scroll through until you find a file called AppName with no extension and a blackish rectangle with the green word "exec" as an icon. Open that file in text edit or another text editor. You'll find that most of this ends up being random symbols and other crap, but you should occasionally see some plain text. The compiler takes string constants and embeds them directly in the app when you compile it in most cases.
You asked about what magazine apps and others do to access content - There are a ton of different ways to do it but off the top of my head, after the server verifies your in-app purchase receipt, the server would record an identifier specific to your iTunes account, saying that you've purchased a specific issue of the magazine. Then your app can request that file from the server, adding the identifier to the request in the process. The server would respond with the file once it looks through the database and determines that you've purchased the content.
Other solutions include signing/hashing a unique key.
Your example would expose the username and password without the need to decompile as you send it via plain text in a URL request. Anyone with a sniffer or MITM service yould snatch it out of the air. A better approach would be to make use of SSL via the http*s* protocol. You could go a step further and either prompt at runtime for the credentials and/or store an encrypted version within the app.
This is very bad because it is trivially easy to recover these credentials just by running 'strings' against the app binary without needing to decompile it.
Can't you pop up a dialogue box asking the user to enter the credentials when they first start the app ? Alternatively you could store them encrypted in a file and then ask the user for an alternative credential e.g. Passcode that derives the key but even this will not survive a determined attack unless the Passcode is long.
From what I understand, UIApplication -openFile can open files externally, the application depending on the URL scheme. Say I have a pages (or word maybe?) document, and I want to open it in pages from my app. Does anyone know the URL scheme for me to do that? Is there a list anywhere? (Keynote, and Numbers would also be useful).
It doesn't work that way because you cannot transmit the file via a URL and Pages cannot access a file that is stored in your app's sandbox.
If you want to give the user the option to open a file in Pages in your UI, UIDocumentInteractionController is the way to do that. It presents a UI where the user can preview the file and select to open it in any application that supports the file type.
AFAIK it is not possible with the SDK to do this completely programmatically, i.e. without user interaction.
I want to bind my app to some file extension so when I receive an email with an attached file with the correct extension, clicking on it will launch my app and pass it the attached file.
Is it possible ? How ?
Thx
--G.
As iPhone applications are not allowed to share files on the file system, what you're looking for is not immediately possible (not with the published APIs that I know of, anyway). You might still have a couple of options though.
Either way you'll have to use a custom URL scheme, which is associated with your app, and paste that into your email. This URL might point to some external location, which your app can download the file from.
Or it might contain the actual file contents if it's fairly small. URLs are 'just text' (some restrictions apply), so you're free to put any data you want to in it, as long as it is URL-encoded.
You still need to get the URL into the email though, which might or might not be as easy as attaching a file.
It's not possible to simply associate a file extension with an application on the iPhone.
You could create a custom URL scheme that would launch your app, but probably that won't help you.
This is actually possible, I'm working on this exact same problem and this great tutorial has really helped me.
I used the sample code from http://cocoawithlove.com/2008/09/streaming-and-playing-live-mp3-stream.html. it runs OK with default URL. But when I replace with my URL "http://dl.mp3.kapsule.info/fsfsdfdsfdserwrwq3/fc90613208cc3f16ae6d6ba05d21880c/4b5244f0/b/7e/b7e80afa18d06fdd3dd9f9fa44b51fc0.mp3?filename=Every-Day-I-Love-You.mp3", this app shows an message as "Audio not Found". But when I put my URL on Address Bar of Web Browser, I can download this .mp3 file.
really, I can't understand why it is?
pleased tell me!
Thank you very much
My guess would be that the app is designed to play a MP3 encoded audio stream with no limit in length (which is different from your ordinary music file). To set this up, you need a streaming server on the client side.
I think you can find out for sure by trying with a different radio station that transmits in MP3. If that works, it's most likely that your app doesn't like your file.
You should, as Vivek recommends, also try using a simpler download URL for your file, in case the App gets confused by the URL's length and/or structure.
As mentioned, this is due to the URL of the file. The AudioStreamer code specifically checks for the extension of the file and tries to figure out the audio type based on that. If you change that logic to handle your custom URLs, it will start working
So to point you in the right direction: open AudioStreamer.m and look for the references of
hintForFileExtension:
This function returns the type of file based on the extension. If you know the file type won't change (always mp3), the quick and dirty solution is to always assign mp3 type without any logic... like this:
err = AudioFileStreamOpen(self, MyPropertyListenerProc, MyPacketsProc, kAudioFileMP3Type, &audioFileStream);
Note: I've put kAudioFileMP3Type constant instead of calculated value
PS yes, it does work with static mp3 files, even though it's designed for streams and hence misses some of the functionality one would expect from a player that plays a static file on the server (caching, prefetching, proper seeking)
Thats because the default url directly points to a file in the webserver, whereas the the url you've mentioned is a HTTP (POST/GET) operation, which the application may not be designed to handle.
I suspect that your URL is one-time-use. When I try to visit it, I see 408 - Request Timeout.
Many links on mass file sharing websites are like this. If you could download the file directly, you wouldn't sit through a page of ads and premium account offers.
Try again with a file on a normal website, like this one.