Question

Whats the best practice to avoid hardcoding links in iOS apps?

I need to link to an external website that does a search based on the URL query string parameters.
Ex. “http://stackoverflow.com/search?q={query}”

I dont want to hardcode the actual url in my app because I don’t want the app to break if the URL changes or the query string parameters change. I’d like to hardcode into my app:
“http://foobar.com?query=someString”
and then redirect that to my actual target, ie, “http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=someString”

I looked into URL shorteners (bit.ly, goo.gl, etc) but they dont allow me to change the target URL. Looks like a URL redirection service might work but I wasn’t able to find one that handles query string parameters in the way I need.

How is this problem typically solved?

thanks!
Mark

Answer 1

Just add a text file (or similar) on your website with the URL(s) in it, fetch it occasionally from your app. Make the app parse the text file and use it to decide what URL it should fetch.