How to save and view a pdf file through an app on iPhone?

Question

Hi All,

I am trying to save a pdf file in SQLite. I think it will be possible by saving the pdf file as blob. And the problem starts here, how to view that file within the iPhone app now? I know it can be done using this code:-

 @interface PDFViewController : UIViewController  {
        UIWebView *webView;
        NSURL *pdfUrl;
    }

    @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIWebView *webView;
    @property (nonatomic, retain) NSURL *pdfUrl;

    @end



@implementation PDFViewController

@synthesize webView, pdfUrl;
    - (void)viewDidLoad {
        [super viewDidLoad];
        // Tells the webView to load pdfUrl
        [webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:pdfUrl]];
    }

But what should be the value of the pdfUrl,I am confused... And if I retrieve it from the DB it will be in a blob format(methinks) so how to convert it into a NSdata object?

Thank You All.

Answer 1

the pdfUrl is the web address of the PDF you are tryign to download from the website. (ie http://website.com/mypdf.pdf)

Read the documentation on NSData, it has a method to allow you to create NSData objects based no what you pull out using sqlite.

Answer 2

The problem is that WebView does the URL loading, and it won't understand things like non-http requests; yet your application is trying to serve the data. So basically, you're out of luck, unless you can deserialise the blob out of the sqllite database, write it to a file (in /tmp, say) and then open up a file:/// URL from the NSWebView - but I don't believe that the object will let you do that.

You might be able to invoke the [UIWebView loadData:MIMEType:textEncodingName:baseURL:] method, which will allow you to extract the NSData blob from the sqllite database, supply a mime-type of application/pdf, stick in a dummy text encoding (UTF-8) and base URL, and then it might do what you want. But I'd be tempted to try that at least.