In the desktop Mac world, if I were to click on a link in a web page which linked to a VCF file, this file would be opened in the Address Book application. In the iPhone world, however, doing that results in the message "Download failed. Safari cannot download this file" being displayed. So, my question is, is it actually possible to add a contact to your iPhone's Address Book from a web page?
I have both the original VCF file and an hCard microformatted version of the data available to me, so the solution does not have to be tied to downloading the original file - I'm able to reprocess the data if necessary. The only requirement is to add the contact to the iPhone's Address Book from a webpage being viewed from within Mobile Safari.
So, any ideas?
[UPDATED - Sep 2013 - iOS7 now supports direct download of VCARDs from we page and import into native contact application so you only need the solution below whilst iOS6 and below still do not support it - that may change in future now that Apple have accepted the feature ]
[UPDATED JAN 2013 - now have added the user agent sniffing and combined into a single download.php file which detects iOS, Mobile Safari, UiWebView scenarios to prevent "Farme Load Interrupted" errors and serves the .vcf file to all bnut Apple devices which get the .vcf embedded in the .ics.]
See the updated complete solution
What follows is a full description of an alternative method for downloading contacts from a web page to an iPhone via Mobile Safari. The basic idea is to attach the required contact information as a file in a calendar event which IS handled by mobile safari. The contact file itself is base64 encoded in the calendar file on the fly using a simple PHP script. So read on...
Just want the source code? Download it here [iphone-contact-download-demo] for a fully working HTML5 Web App that you are free to copy and reproduce or go to http://iphone.mobicontact.info for a working demo. The demo uses the HTML5 cache manifest which downloads the content to your iphone or HTML5 supporting browser for use when offline. Please google for more details about "offline web apps" if you want to know more.
Embedded VCARD in VCALENDAR for iPhone download
You may have read that it is not possible to download contact files (VCARD format data as .vcf file) direct to your iPhone from a web page using Mobile Safari. The browser just does not recognise the .vcf extension and mime type (text/x-vcard) as something it should handle. As an aside, Android and most other mobile devices should be able to handle VCARD files easily enough - the standard itself is as old as the hills!
You may also have read that it IS possible to achieve something workable by requesting the users email address and then email them the contact file OR creating a link to a Google Map entry and extract the contact information from that (Google Map entry requires weeks to attain in the UK).
Whilst these are both viable solutions, they are not what I would call user friendly and I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a client of mine to accept either one of them for their contact download on a mobile web app.
Now at this point I should also mention that you CAN download some third party apps that add support for VCARD (.vcf) files - such as QRAFTER and VCARD GETTER both from Kerem Erkan's excellent QR reader and his blog on the subject and iPad solution, and HIPSCAN vcard importer. But assuming your readers have these apps installed is one step too far in my opinion so I searched for an alternative solution to email, google maps and third party apps.
Before I continue, there are many links describing the problem in more detail:
Stack overflow has several threads on the subject
Forcing vCard download (thesheep.co.uk)
The EMAIL solution and associated blog from the Code Train here vCard options for download
There is also a possible solution using Google Maps here. And this is also covered by this article from Dataplex.
Jonas Schmid talks about serving the file types correctly.
MacRumours thread
Then I got thinking, iPhone DOES support vcalendar files downloaded from a webpage as of IOS5. The VCALENDAR files usually have a .ics extension and are handled by mobile safari bringing up a window where the file can be opened and saved to the calendar. I find it unbelievable that Apple and Mobile Safari support VCAL files but not VCARD files but that is just how it is. So what IF I could attach a VCARD file to a VCALENDAR file?
First obstacle is getting an attachment on a calendar event...
Initially I tried adding an attachment to an Outlook calendar appointment in Windows which whilst possible did not download correctly when linked from a webpage and certainly didn't yield the result I was after. So, I decided to try using Apple software as, after all, we are trying to download onto an iPhone. Using Apple's default calendar application "iCal" presents one fundamental problem - you can't add attachments to an event/calendar appointment! So I googled "adding attachments to calendar events in OSX" or similar and found this excellent article which pointed me in the right direction.
Adding attachments to calendar appointments in OSX.
So a few minutes later and with a copy of BusyCal installed, I was able to create an event and attach a VCARD file to it (previously saved/exported from my contacts in OSX). This step is only necessary to understand the format of the file created when an attachment is added to a calendar item - you DO NOT need to install BusyCal to implement the solution described below but I include it for reference so that you can see how the VCARD is embedded in the VCALENDAR/VEVENT (.ics) file.
The steps I used were on an Apple iMac running OSX Lion:
Export a contact from your Contacts/Address Book to create a VCARD file (.vcf) - you can edit this file with a text editor to strip out all the extra stuff such as UID and PROD-ID if you like.BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Contact;iPhone;;;
FN:iPhone Contact
EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:iphone#mobicontact.info
TEL;type=CELL;type=VOICE;type=pref:012-345-6789
END:VCARD
Create a new calendar - call it what you like, I used "vcal"- in the "On my Mac" area so that when you export this calendar to generate the .ics file, all you get is the single event with the attached card rather than all the events you might have if you use an existing calendar.
Create a new event - call it anything you like - and give it an arbitrary time and date.
Attach the VCARD file from (1) to this new event - see screenshot.
Save the event to the calendar.
From the main menu of BusyCal, export the calendar to an .ics file on your local disk - download the zip file here --> Apple calendar event with attached contact file.
You can now use your favourite text editor to examine how Apple store attachments in calendar events and the result is using:ATTACH;VALUE=BINARY;ENCODING=BASE64;FMTTYPE=text/directory;
X-APPLE-FILENAME=iPhone Contact.vcf:
QkVHSU46VkNBUkQNClZFUlNJT046M...etc... [base64 encoded VCARD]
So I then stripped out all the extra stuff I didn't need (trial and error here) until I had the absolute minimum that was still recognised by the iPhone as a valid calendar event with attachment. The reason for doing this is to make the PHP file that creates the calendar event on the final webpage as easy as possible - here is the vcal-minimal of what I reduced it to.
So all of the above, as I said, is not necessary to implement the contact download solution - I just wanted to show you how I got to understanding how Apple attach files using the X-APPLE-FILENAME contact line. And of course, how they encode the VCARD data using base64 encoding. So now we have all the info we need to create VEVENTs on the fly and attach VCARDs to them that can be downloaded direct to an iPhone via Mobile Safari.
1)Upload the contact file (.vcf) you want to be downloaded - you'll need this file so that you can either download it direct to non-iphones or base64 encode it for the iPhone.
2)Create a link to a PHP file that will generate the calendar event on the fly such as:
Download Contact iPhone perhaps in a HTML5 mobile app like below:
3)Create or upload the vcal.php with the code here iphonecontact-source-code. This PHP file applies the correct header/content type for the calendar file to be downloaded then you have a choice of either getting the calendar file contents directly "iphonecontact.ics" as done in "vcal-from-file.php" or generating the calendar on the fly as shown in "vcal.php". The latter is my preferred method because you get a nice timestamped calendar event showing the time and date of the download.
4)That's it! You're all set - now browse to the web page on your iphone and click the link to execute "vcal.php". Your browser should now show the iphonecontact.ics file and ask you to open it in the phones Calendar application
5)Select "Open in..." and you will be presented with the calendar appointment and the attached contact file.
6)Notice how I set the title of the calendar event to something useful to tell the user what to do with the embedded contact file (you can see the line in vcal.php that sets the SUMMARY field for the event). So now click the attached contact file...
7)And then "Create New Contact" and you're nearly there...
Save the contact and curse under your breath at the hoops Apple made you jump through!
Now there are a couple of points I'd like to mention here based on my experiences using this technique on HTML5 web apps:
Using the cache manifest - I had some unexpected behaviour/problems serving the the calendar file (iphonecontact.ics) if it had been cached - I just couldn't get it to work so I exclude it from the manifest which means it is always downloaded - source code is included in this zip file iphonecontact-source-code.
I have added some user agent sniffing to detect in the "vcal.php" or whatever you call it (download.php in latest online example) PHP file whether to serve the VCALENDAR file to an iPhone and the VCARD file itself to all other browsers.
Also be careful, if viewed through a UiWebView application then I redirect the user to a page that says open with Mobile Safari (as suggested by someone on my blog) otherwise you get the dreaded "Frame Load Interrupted" error.
I think that's about it - so to summarise:
Mobile safari doesn't support VCARD (.vcf) files directly but does support VCALENDAR (.ics) files.
Current best solutions are to email the contact by requesting the users email address OR to embed the contact in a google map link OR download an app that handles VCARDS.
Apple does support attachments to calendar files but not easily so once we know how this is done we can do it in PHP.
Embed a VCARD into a VCALENDAR file to allow a user to save a contact to their address book with just an extra click or two.
I hope you like this solution - it is as good as I think we are going to get until Apple relent and allow Mobile Safari to accept VCARD files.
Until next time...
Whilst slightly outside of the scope of my original requirements, I have found a solution to the problem that I can work with.
As it turns out, if you receive an email with a vcard in it as an attachment, then you are able to open this attachment and add it to your address book. So, if instead of offering a vcard download link to iPhone users you provide them with a way to be sent the vcard via email instead then they are able to add the card to their address book.
A slightly roundabout solution, but about the best I'm able to come up with whilst Apple don't allow you to do it natively. Certainly it's a better solution than doing nothing at all.
I ended up writing a blog post about this: Adding a vCard to your iPhone Address Book from a web page
For Googlers, as of This post, in iOS 7 (beta 6) The file can be opened directly into the contacts app and saved.
I was able to get this working on a web app using the following resources:
vCards-JS - Simple API for creating a vCard. The example in the Readme shows how to create a vCard, assigned to variable vCard
Stack Overflow Post: "Download data url file" - Replace "helloWorld.txt" with vCard.getFormattedString(). the filename (i.e. name argument) should of course end in .vcf as well.
Confirmed working on Android, IOS and Outlook.
According to the reference library adding contact to the iPhone's Address Book is not possible..
The available schemes are: mail, phone, text, map, youtube and iTunes links.
Iphone URL Scheme Reference
Related
I want to be able in my app to upload files from my computer(windows,mac...) to the iPhone,so i an looking for a source code in objective-c that open server on iPhone,
but my question is, how i implement an upload from my computer to the device?
Edit
I want to upload the file from a computer that is on the same Network like the device,
something like :
the user will open browser and select a file and it will be upload to the device.
i found CocoaHTTPServer but i really didn't understand how to upload a file to the iPhone with this.
you probably want to upload the file to FTP-server, that shouldn't be a problem.
set up a webservice or json on your server to know what changed, or should be downloaded (depends heavily on your business logic of your app) - it could also be a static textfile
now the problem is how the app knows that there is are new files.
option 1: poll server if user presses a button or on every app start, etc.
option 2: send push notification to your iPhone app, if there are new file.
polling the server would be very easy to implement, compared to sending push notification.
EDIT:
alright i read your edited post. hosting a local webserver on an iphone sounds still weird to me.
another possible solution, that could work for you - if you only want to transfer only a few and rather small files:
enable Document Interaction in your app.
this would allow the user to send the file by mail to your iphone and open the document with your app with the "open in..." dialog .
I'm building a web-application where users can upload their images. What I know is that it's "impossible" to do a file upload from an iPhone. Is it possible to achieve the same thing by letting the users e-mail their images to an adress on the same domain and the upload from there?
It's not impossible, but you will need to write some code to do so and get it deployed on the app store. If you google for something like iphone http fille upload you'll come across loads of code examples.
It's quite possible there is already an app to upload to arbitrary web hosts, I've never looked.
Why not go with an MMS online supplier with an api? and then get the image from the api.
http://www.routomessaging.com/sms/sweden.php
If not then you could probably do what you want with an open mail client and some rules, or you could build a simple mailserver from one of the libraries on the web, should not be too hard...
We have an iPhone app that can display an image dataset and pass it to an UIImageviewer - however we could do with a rough pointer. If the user was sent the dataset (image) via email as an attachment how could we pass that onto the app to be displayed. These are not regular jpeg/png/bmp images - more datasets which need to go through / use a set of libraries to be displayed.
You can launch an application if that application registers its own URL scheme. However, I'm not sure how you would embed your own scheme into an email attachment.
http://mobileorchard.com/apple-approved-iphone-inter-process-communication/
http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html
On a related note, I've noticed that you have been asking a lot of questions regarding DICOMs and iOS devices, trying to develop your own app, because you have a particular (email-centric) workflow not supported by existing PACS. It seems like you've already developed your own app, so congratulations are in order. If at any time, you decide that it may be more trouble than its worth, feel free to check out ours.
http://nephosct.com
Currently we bootstrap off of OsiriX as our server, but that should be fixed when we release a platform independent version (hopefully within a week). We would also be happy to work with you to add features to the app so that it supports your daily workflow.
My application is somehowe a library, represented by a UITableView, each row displays three book icons, pressing on any icon would cause the app to navigate to a scrollview that scrolls between the book pages.
Each book is represented in the resources directory by two things :
1- a .plist file, eg : Book1.plist
2- a folder containing images ( each one corresponds to a book page )
I want to allow the user to buy new books, so if he wants to buy a certain book, what happens is that the new book's "plist file" & "images folder" are downloaded to the application, and then the book is automatically displayed in the UITableView (I have done this last part, which is : adding a new plist file to the app would update the UITableView with a new book icon).
SO how can this downloading thing be achieved ?
I think that the user, when clicking on the "download new book" button, should navigate to apple store webpage which contains the books that should be downloaded right ?
Then buying a book would directly download the "plist file" & "images folder" to the application, but how can this be done ?
Please can anyone offer a detailed help, and thanks in advance
You probably want In-App purchase, with a few caveats:
In-App purchase is entirely in-app. There is no "apple store webpage" (do you mean "App Store"?); you do the UI yourself, and then ask StoreKit to authorize the transaction
The App Store does not store extra content for you. Either you bundle the books with the app (i.e. the "purchase" unlocks content that has already been downloaded), or you use your own server (or Google App Engine, Amazon EC2/S3/CloudFrount/whatever) to serve the content.
EDIT:
The only way to add bundled books is to release an update. This generally involves a 1-2 week delay and is prohibitive if your books are big.
It's entirely trivial to rename .ipa to .zip and unzip to get the resources (the binary is encrypted but the resources aren't), so you might want to add encryption (encryption for DRM-like purposes doesn't require CCATS classificaton/exception/whatever).
Writing a webserver is out of the scope of this answer. An easy way is to just stick static content in a hidden directory on a server somewhere; the "proper" way is to have the app send the App Store transaction receipt to the server, verify it on the server, and deliver the content only if verification passes. I'm not sure if there's open-source code or a proprietary service which lets you do this without writing your own code.
I am trying to build an application which should send the data as an xml file to the server and other user's should be able to see the info uploaded by another user.
Embedding everything in xml file is done but now the question is how to push this information to the other user's so that they can see it in a particular format. Also how i can proceed towards making my own server to support this iphone app.
Thanks,
You can probably using a loop in your iPhone to check for new data every 1-2 minute. iPhone app can call your service to check if there is new information, if it doesn't have, you return a code to tell. If it has new information, you return the new information under a specific format.
The server and iPhone app has to agree on the same xml format