Get data from server in iOS

Question

I have a script that takes hours and outputs if it is open or closed and I want to run this on my server, and then from my iOS app get if a certain place is open or closed. And I was wondering how I could do this without generating an JSON file and then parsing that as I would to frequently re-generate the file as the things change from open to closed and such. So is there a way I could make a call to the server and just get the data that I want?

Answer 1

Im not entirely sure whether you are asking specifically for an iOS framework for requests and responses or server side. So I figure I will try to answer both. Here are some swift projects you might be interested in. I'm not incredibly familiar with objective c yet but these resources might prove useful.

Alamofire This will help you send and receive http requests.

Swifty JSON This will help with JSON parsing

However if your question is more regarding server side issues. You could look into a REST api and that way you could only request certain entities that you are interested in instead of just sending back the entire batch of information with all of your data, and searching through it on the iOS device.

Hopefully this is somewhat helpful.

Answer 2

If you are only planning on GET-ing some content from the web you can use the NSURL class. NSURL *lru = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http:mywebserver.com"] and then create a new string object from the url with [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:lru], or any data you would like. If you are trying to hold a session or having more control over the request, I would suggest looking into the NSURLSession class.