Question

The documentation says nothing about possible return values. I have looked for the implementation in the source code, but I am unable to find it.

I wrote a simple application and ran it in the iPhone Simulator, but no value is shown. The application was created by running rhogen app phone_id. I then added the following line to the app/application.rb file just before the call to super:

@phoneId = System.get_property('phone_id')

Then I added this line to app/index.erb:

<p>Phone id = <span><%= @phoneId %></span></p>

I know that the simulator will return a unique identifier because I wrote an actual iOS application that merely writes the unique identifier to a label with the following bit of code:

[idLabel setText:[[UIDevice currentDevice] uniqueIdentifier]];

Since I don’t know Ruby, and I particularly don’t know Rhodes, I am unsure if the Rhodes test application I wrote is working correctly. So, I don’t know if the call to System.get_property is working as it should or if it should really be returning an identifier.

Thus my question, does System.get_property('phone_id') always return a value? If so, is that value guaranteed to be unique? Or are there cases where the method will return nil?

Answer 1

According to messages cb41fb9718773a21 and 0d4ff1aaaaa9e560 on the Rhomobile Google group, this method is not guaranteed to return any value other than nil. Thus you cannot rely on System.get_property('phone_id') to return a unique identifier for your application.