I’ve been asked to make a small quiz/survey application for a conference. The application will be loaded onto 30 to 50 iPhones, which will be distributed throughout the venue for the duration of the conference. The application will log all of the data collected by the quiz. I need to figure out a simple and fail-safe way to collect all of this data at the end of the conference.
Does anybody have any ideas about how I should:
- log the data on the device
- collect the data logs from all of the devices
- introduce some kind of redundancy to prevent data loss if the app crashes etc.
There are several ways you could do this but it will really depend on time to develop and the availability of internet access.
If time is not on your side and need to get it done quick then I would highly recommend storing it locally in a plist file of the applications document directory. Then when when completed, you could simply add an admin section to your application where you can extract the plist file of the answers and email it. This is pretty straight forward and really easy to get the data.
If you have more time then I would recommend building a web server app that could accept the data and store the results on the server. This is bit more complicated but there are several examples on how to create a web server to pass information between your iPhone and the web server.
The last approach would be hybrid of both. Store all answers in a plist file or with CoreData, and at the end, you could have a feature that communicates to your web server and sends all the results to the server.