Fetch remote plist file, use in a UITableView

Question

Hello,

I have successfully created an app that reads from a bundled .plist file and displays the contents in a UITableView. I would like to move that plist to an external site, as it is updated frequently. even better, I would love to have it generated with PHP. I have got the server side working, but the Objective C is giving me a headache...

My code used to read like this:

NSString *myfile = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"notices" ofType:@"plist"];

according to various google searches, my code should now look something like this:

NSString *myfile = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://localhost/plistgen1.php"]];

Obviously this is not going to work, mixing NSString with NSDictionary, but I have tried (and failed) to get it to work properly. does anyone have a solution, or a different way to approach the problem? The data I am using is on a mysql server, and the plistgen1.php just "fills in the blanks" in the plist file and echoes it out...

I may have got this all wrong, don't shoot me :)

Answer 1

The first case ("My code used to read like this") gives you the local filesystem path to the bundled plist file and saves it to the variable myfile. In the second case you're downloading the plist file's contents from the server and creating a dictionary from that.

You probably have some code after the assignment of the file path to myfile that reads the contents of that file into an NSDictionary. You need to replace both the assignment to myfile and that statement with the second example.

So you'd replace something like this:

// determine filesystem path to bundled plist file
NSString *myfile = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"notices" ofType:@"plist"];
// read contents of that plist file and parse them into a dictionary
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:myfile];

With this:

// download plist file contents from URL and parse them into a dictionary
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://localhost/plistgen1.php"]];