Question

I need a solution for a feature in an app my company is building. It is an IOS app for iPhone and iPad and we support ios5 and above only.

The end result we need is for the user to tap a button inside the settings area that dumps the apps internal database cleanly, attaches it to an email for the user to then address to whoever they wish.

Attaching to an email is not an issue. What I am concerned about is if it is reasonable to think that exporting a copy of an sqlite database to an email as an attachment would leave the user with a usable copy of the database. My customer base is not good about doing backups but the data is nevertheless very important to them.

Will a hot export of an sqlite database be usable, i.e. is this supported, or will the database be corrupt sometimes/always?

Keep in mind that all this function has to do is make it so that a usable copy of the database gets off the device and stored safely offline so that I can then walk them through restoring the database by copying it back into the device using iExplorer or PhoneView.

In the future we plan to add a robust export and import feature, but for now we are looking for a solution that we can implement in a day or less.

Thanks in advance for anybodys input and gasp some objective-c code that would dump a clean copy of an sqlite database in such a way that the database will be usable and not corrupted.

Answer 1

You don’t need to make a hot copy of the database. When the user chooses the backup feature of your app, close the database, copy the file, and then reopen the database. You can now attach the copied file to the email.

I have a feature in my app for doing just this. I’ve never had an issue with a corrupt database file. As long as there are no active transactions running, the sqlite file should be OK to copy, especially if there are no open handles.

Another option would be to use the sqlite3_backup_init and related functions to copy the database.