All I wanted was some simple code to POST an image to a web service from my iPhone project. No big deal, right? Apparently, not.
Based on my google search results many people we were wanting the same thing and just not finding it. There are a couple iphone development sites giving examples and some really old open-source projects but nothing really felt right to me. So being a good developer I hacked something together which works for me and posted it on GitHub.
Issuing standard GETs and POSTs with Cocoa is pretty easy, but I couldn't find anything easy to make multi-part forms for POSTing. This is where mini-mallows comes in. Just make some Cocoa, add some mini-mallows (form fields & a file), and POST.
Easy.
This project was written to satisfy my need to POST a single image and related form fields from an iPhone app to a web service. It only allows for the addition of one file per request. I am very open to comments, patches, and ridicule.
**UPDATE: Vladimir Pouzanov has written a multi-part form wrapper for cocoa which I've added to MM. If you can read Russian his blog post is here. I'll move all this readme to the wiki if I can get Vladimir to write an English version.
Copy the files MultipartForm.h and MultipartForm.m anywhere you like into your Xcode project.
First, add your standard #import.
#import "MultipartForm.h"
Create a NSURL object as you'll need to send that to Mini-Mallows.
NSURL *postUrl = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.domain.com"];
Now create a MultipartForm object and a few form fields and a file. I really wanted to call the class MiniMallows but
MultipartForm is easier on the eyes.
MultipartForm *form = [[MultipartForm alloc] initWithURL:postUrl];
[form addFormField:@"formFieldName1" withStringData:@"This is some data"];
[form addFormField:@"formFieldName2" withStringData:@"This is more data"];
[form addFile:@"path/to/file" withFieldName:@"formFieldForFile"];
When you are done adding fields and the file you can get a fully formed NSMutableURLRequest object from Mini-Mallows.
NSMutableURLRequest *postRequest = [form mpfRequest];
All set so POST the form.
NSData *urlData;
NSURLResponse *response;
NSError *error;
urlData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:postRequest returningResponse:&response error:&error];
DQMultipartForm is based on the concepts of MultipartForm, but has simplier interface. To create new form you init it with NSURL object:
NSURL *postUrl = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.domain.com"];
DQMultipartForm *form = [[[DQMultipartForm alloc] initWithURL:postUrl] autorelease];
Now you can add fields to your form. This is done via addValue:forField: selctor. You can pass any object to get its description as value, so you can simply add NSNumber without converting to NSString:
[form addValue:[NSNumber numberWithInt:10] forKey:@"myInt"];
If the passed object is a NSString and key starts with "@" than it's parsed a request to add file. In this case value is a file name pointing to file that would be added for given key without "@" char.
DQMultipartForm supports adding several values for same key, this is useful in case you have php on server side and want to process key[]=value1&key[]=value2 autoarrays.
To build a request you simply call
NSURLRequest *rq = [form urlRequest];
Please note, that actual data processing (and file loading) is done at this step.
File data is loaded in one big chunk, so it may take large amounts of RAM if you add a big file.
Samuel Schroeder
- samuelschroeder@gmail.com
- http://samuelschroeder.com
- Managing Consultant <:> Proton Microsystems, LLC <:> iPhone/Rails Development
- twitter - @SamSchroeder
Vladimir Pouzanov
- Blog http://farcaller.net/blog/
- Email farcaller@gmail.com
- Jabber farcaller@im.hackndev.com
- Twitter @farcaller
- Linkedin farcaller
Copyright (c) 2008 Samuel Schroeder / Proton Microsystems, LLC & Vladimir Pouzanov / Hack&Dev FSO
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