Php – How to make a server send a processed data back to the invoking iPhone

client-serveriphonenetwork-programmingPHP

I am sorry if the title is unclear. Allow me to elaborate further.

Firstly, I have an application on an iPhone that will allow the user to upload a data to server. We simply use php to allow the user to upload the data.
Secondly, the server will process this data and then return the processed data back to this iPhone. This part is the part that I am still having trouble.

My question is "how to make the server send the processed data back to the invoking iPhone?" Are there some sort of "listening to server" method in iPhone SDK or there are other ways to consider? In the case of some errors in connection, is it possible for the server to know which iPhone to send the data back to?

Best Answer

Well the iPhone is able to make HTTP requests, as you will have to do to send the data to your PHP app on the server. In the HTTP response is where you'll put the processed data. You'll want to look at The URL Loading System doc for info on how to use it. The response you get back will be in something like XML or maybe JSON, in which case you can use a 3rd party library.

If you can't do this in one request - for example if your server side processing takes hours - the only way you'll be able to send the data back is with a Push Notification. There's no listening web server that is running on the iPhone that you would be able to send requests to.

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I would say this is a perfect case for an AJAX snippet frequently polling data from, say, a text file the .exe writes its status in.

The upload script you call could return a unique identifier of some sort to the uploading client. Using that identifier, the client would poll the exe's status (e.g. "does the output file xyz already exist?") until it gets positive feedback.

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The 500 your getting is probably based on one of two things:

An incorrect request
An error on the server

Now, if its an incorrect, the HTTP server would be more helpful responding back with like a 415 (unsupported media type) or something. A 500 insists that something went wrong on the server and that your request was valid.

You'll have to dig into the server API or code (if you wrote it), or read the docs and figure out what's wrong with your second request ... seems like maybe your not setting the appropriate media type?

EDIT: Ok, so I looked at the API. It appears your posting XML, so your request content-type should be

Content-Type: application/xml

The API doc didn't specifically say, but that would be the correct type.

EDIT: Actually on second glance, are you just POSTing w/URI params? Their API doc isn't clear (I'm also looking rather quickly)

Best Answer

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