Question

So I have a pretty simple problem, which I have no idea how to go about (kinda of new for everything here). I am developing an iPhone app that I intend to use only myself – so think small for now :)Let’s say all my app is doing is tracking my location every hour. All I want to do, is to be able to read this information not on the iphone, say on a file on my computer. How can I send this information from my app to a personal computer? I am guessing that I will need to set up some server / database or something on my personal machine?

Can someone please help with a quick step by step on how to go about that? I literally have no clue where to start…

Thanks!

Answer 1

You’ll need to have a listener somewhere to send your data to. For instance, you could set up a communication class in your project which would be responsible for serving as the medium between your applications. You would then set up a listener on a server, or your machine that would listen for requests.

iPhone > Communication Class > Web service
(.NET in this case)

You can use the NSURLConnection object to serve this purpose. E.g.

   - (void) sendSomethingToServer:(NSString*)myData{
        NSString*url = [[NSString alloc]initWithFormat: @"http://example.com/service.asmx/RecordData?myData='%@'", myData];
        [self createRequest:url];
        [url release];
    }

http://example.com/service.asmx/RecordData being the location and method on your web service.

Here’s a generic request method I created which sets the headers as a JSON packet.

- (void) createRequest: (NSString*)urlFormatted {
    NSLog(@"Request Sent");
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString: urlFormatted];
    NSMutableURLRequest *request =[NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL: url];

    [request setHTTPMethod:@"GET"];
    [request setValue:@"application/json; charset=UTF-8" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
}

And on the back-end, on your web server, you would have a method that recieves the data. Obviously you could use any technology you wanted on the server. In this example, I’m using .NET on Mono e.g.

[WebMethod(Description = "Generic Client Data)]
[ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = true, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)]
public string RecordData(string myData)
{
  // Do something with data
}