(Very) basically my app is just a load of information collected from the internet - eg: someone can log into an admin panel on a website and update their app from there. The information gets put into a mysql database.
The way I thought about going about this was to use an RSS feed - it works for blog/twitter feeds, so I thought why not do it for the rest of the information that I want to get.
My question is, is this a suitable way to do it? Basically just make dynamic XML files (php scripts that output XML) and parse them on the iphone, or is there a better way to do it?
I'm not looking for a full blown tutorial, just maybe a few keywords that I can go off and look up myself - or a "XML is the best way... stick at that". :p
Thanks a lot.
I personally like JSON more than XML, since it creates less characters to transfer the same data = less bandwidth/transfer used and faster response.
You can use a JSON library from here or just stick with XML since you're familiar with it. I guess it's just a matter of personal preference.
Related
I am creating an epub3 with a form inside. Is it possible to save the information that was inputted in the form locally when the user is offline and send it to a web service if the user is online?
THIS is a good question! Finally...
OK, for the first part of your question (saving the information) you can use localstorage, for some great info on that go here: http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html.
The next part of the answer is not quite so simple: ideally you could just use some sort of try catch with an XHR request, but chances are that won't work because most ePub3 readers (actually, pretty much all of them except Readium) don't support XHR or external request functionality. See this post for more info on that: http://beneaththeink.com/blog/who-supports-epub/.
If you want your book to be distributed through any of the "normal" channels (pretty much just iBooks since you need Script support at this point) you won't be able to send the data at this point in time...
However, if you will be distributing the book yourself for use on Readium and iBooks (or if you want to plan ahead and hope for support) there are a few hacks you can do. My personal favorite, is embedding the data in a media request (IE www.yoursite.com/fake.m4v?data1=localStorage.data1&data2=localStorage.data2) and pulling out the data on your server. This would be nested in a try catch and activated whenever the book is opened.
If you include the base url (www.yoursite.com) in the .opf file, as well as at some point in the chapter which contains the script, this will work in iBooks! If you don't include it in the .opf the request will get blocked right out of the gate... For more information on why this won't work in the actual iBookstore check out this post: http://beneaththeink.com/blog/external-video-in-ibooks-epub-files/.
Best of luck!!!
I'm creating an iPhone Game where I want the user to get a unique numeric code when they first launch the app, that way when a friend of that user opens it, he/she can input that code and both users can get rewarded. I haven't encountered any issues regarding that, however what I want to do is make it to where the app registers the code given to every user and saves it to a website of some sort. That way when the other user enters the code, it will load the data from that website and check if it's registered. How would I manage to save the data onto a website? and also What free website could I use for this without having a character limit on the body page?
-Thanks in advance
Your thinking is correct, in that you need to save your data somewhere online, but you don't really "save data onto a website" in the way that you're describing. "Free Website" services usually serve a different purpose entirely - that of serving up public html pages. Sure, they can take the form of a CMS (like wordpress.com or tumblr accounts), but using that as an interface for storing your application's data is not something they're typically designed to do.
For something like this, where you have a public iPhone app that requires secure access to custom strings, you really want to have control over your own web server (different than a domain name, btw), and interface with a database on that server. This will come at a cost, and will involve more code than you're likely to find someone to write for you on here. Sorry to say it, but hey if someone wants to prove me wrong I'd love to see it.
Because all you need to store & retrieve are random strings (basically referral codes... if I'm understanding correctly), your database needs are pretty simple. If you're not familiar with things like PHP / MySQL, and you don't want to learn, it might be worth reaching out to some server-side developers for help. Unless there's more to it than you describe, you can probably find someone to help you for relatively cheap.
Good luck - and I'm sorry there isn't a simpler answer for ya.
You can send data using NSURLConnection. Just create an NSMutableURLRequest and call its -setHTTPMethod: method with “POST” as the HTTP method. Then, set its body and header fields appropriately, and you can use NSURLConnection to send the data.
I am a beginner at both iPhone programming and SQL, yet I have basic knowledge of them.
I am planning to do an application that would plot a graph from data taken from a database of the server of my company. I know how to plot, I know how to extract data from an sql table, but what I don't know is how to access the server.
So do I have to go through some kind of oracle-like application ?
This may seem like a very stupid question because it might not even be possible but any answer will be appreciated.
Thanks !
Go through a web service for example a PHP page that returns JSON (or XML, but JSON is easier to parse).
I can highly recommend this tutorial
Once you have your web service, you can use NSURLRequest/NSURLConnection to download the data and use a JSON framework to parse it. Or, if you're using XML you can use NSXMLParser.
See this apple code for more info on downloading using NSURLConnection.
The best way for this will be, using APIs at server end that handle the client request and perform database interaction, so transfer of data among device and server, take place through XMLs that will be secure as well as fast.
It is definitely possible to contact a server (I can't imagine what would happen without that!). What you are looking for is NSURLConnection. Have a look at the example provided by Apple.
I am looking to build software that has an Iphone application as well as a Wordpress based website. Essentially the user will enter data into the iphone app that will then be relayed to the Wordpress site and displayed in various manners.
Whats the best way to get the iphone database and CMS database to communicate?
Thanks
This might go without saying, but generally speaking I would try to keep your client (iPhone) app as 'dumb' as possible; Your Wordpress DB should really own all of the content, and the data stored on the iPhone should be as temporal as possible. To put it another way, your app should be like a WP theme. A theme doesn't really 'know' about the WP database - it's just responsible for displaying it (and occasionally adding to it with things like comment forms).
Anyway, as for the actual communication I would recommend keeping as much in JSON as possible (I've found it easier than XML). There's a great plug-in for Wordpress that can help you out, that exposes WP functionality in a JSON-based API: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
As for working with JSON on the phone itself, I highly recommend the json-framework: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ . In short, it'll convert a JSON string into an NSDictionary in one method. Incredibly useful.
Good luck!
May be it's too obvious, but usually for database communicaton used XML, CSV, JSON etc.
When looking to get data from a web page whats the recommended method if the page does not provide a structured data feed? Am I right in thinking that its just a case of doing an NSURLRequest and then hacking what you need out of the responseData(NSData*)? I am not too concerned about the implementation in Xcode, I am more curious about actually collecting the data, before I start coding a "hunt & peck" through a list of data.
gary
Unless you are in control of what is getting fetched (e.g. you're sending yourself well-formed XML and can parse it appropriately), you're pretty much forced to picking through it "by hand" as you say. What you're doing here is also called "screen scraping".