how to send objecs from an iPhone app to a server app using XML??

Question

Hi!

I'm building an application in the iPhone where the communication with a PHP server is needed (using XML).

I'm able to receive data from the server and I handle the xml file using the NSXML parser.

I haven't found too much documentation about sending data from the iPhone to the server (via XML).

Any idea, links, and examples will be appreciated.

regards Alejandra

Answer 1

it depends on the magnitude of your data. but if it simple data, I think you can use REST to post or put data to the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational%5FState%5FTransfer

Answer 2

I am currently using XML-RPC to talk to a server from the iPhone. There seems to be two implementations to choose from.

The most popular seems to be from the WordPress for iPhone app, but be aware that this is GPL licensed:

http://iphone.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/Classes/XMLRPC

I myself am using this code, which is MIT licensed:

http://github.com/eczarny/xmlrpc/tree/master

Answer 3

A quick and dirty synchronous REST implementation would look something like this:

NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:@"http://yourserver.com/script"];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
const char *bytes = [[NSString stringWithFormat:@"<?xml version=\"1.0\">\n<yourxml>%@</yourxml>", yourData] UTF8String];
[request setBody:[NSData dataWithBytes:bytes length:strlen(bytes)]];
NSURLResponse *response;
NSError *err;
NSData *responseData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&err];

It takes a few more steps to send this POST asynchronously. You can read about this in the docs for NSURLConnection and the URL Loading System.