Comments on: Playing with HTTP libraries

By: Jeffrey Leo Oloresisimo

Jeffrey Leo Oloresisimo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:20:24 +0000

Hi, i really like this wrapper class you created but i have a question…. how could i do it in a secure HTTP? im trying to implement a secure HTTP RESTful web service but when I use this project to test connection between my server it does not work.

I would really appreciate the help….

By: Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:57:17 +0000

Thanks Sandra! :)

By: sandrar

sandrar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:56:30 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: Matthew Gravatt

Matthew Gravatt — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:34:26 +0000

Thank you, Adrian. Extremely useful code and thread.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:55:32 +0000

If you guys need to debug, run REST or any HTTP calls there is an Eclipse plugin where you can visually construct your REST call: http://http4e.roussev.org/

Of course this is not an Objective-C client, yet it is very powerful tool.

By: iPhone SDK, Cocoa & RESTful Web Services, Memory Leak « Ambient Ideas

iPhone SDK, Cocoa & RESTful Web Services, Memory Leak « Ambient Ideas — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:16:19 +0000

[...] A Blog about 5 languages calling web services, including Objective-C [...]

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:46:21 +0000

@Simon: please check http://kosmaczewski.net/2009/01/19/objective-c-rest-client-update/ as I’ve fixed the formatting of data sent via POST… it turns out that the method I was using was wrong, and CoreFoundation has a better way to handle URL formatting.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:44:28 +0000

Adrian, Just had a scan through. Looks good. Will try it out. Am wondering if the method used for POSTing form data via URL encoding ends up putting a restriction on how much data you are able to submit as I recall there being a limit on the length of a URL (though I don’t know what it is). Perhaps this is a REST interaction characteristic that I don’t yet understand. Again thanks
Cheers
Simon

By: Adrian

Adrian — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 12:21:41 +0000

Hi Simon, thanks to you for the work you’ve done in your comment! Indeed this version is my first attempt to make a REST wrapper for Objective-C code, you might want to check out this one:
http://kosmaczewski.net/2008/10/18/rest-and-objective-c-again/
It’s a more polished version, and it’s being used not only in my own projects but also in a friend of mine’s :) And as far as I can tell, POST requests work fine, but of course I might not be doing it properly ;) Thanks for the “heads up” and I’ll fix the code as soon as I can to make it more HTTP-compliant.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 03:45:28 +0000

Adrian,
Once again, thanks for posting the code and updates. Migrating to a delegate method at the moment. I can see the advantages. I’m still somewhat hung up on your sendRequestTo method. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t think it’s all encompassing (yet), that is, works for all verbs, in particular POST with form data. If I’m wrong please let me know and I’ll study it again to try and figure it out.

I do see in your example (in the comment history), the uploadData method so I see a form data based method, (though not with a set of parameters) It is a POST example that seems to be almost what you need for generic form POST requests.

In your sendRequestTo, you set
[headers setValue:@"text/html; charset=utf-8" forKey:@"Content-Type"];

That’s great for GET, but for POST form data won’t work.

Also adding parameters via:
for (id key in parameters)
{
[params appendFormat:@"%@=%@&", [key stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding], [[parameters objectForKey:key] stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
}

is also great for GET, but not for POST (unless you want url paramters in addition to form parameters).

I have (pulled from some other code elsewhere) some form parameter construction code of the following nature:
NSString *stringBoundary = [NSString stringWithString:@"0xKhTmLbOuNdArY"];
if (parameters)
{
NSMutableData *postBody = [NSMutableData data];
[postBody appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"--%@",stringBoundary] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
for (id key in parameters)
{
[postBody appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name=\"%@\"\r\n\r\n",
key] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
[postBody appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",
[parameters objectForKey:key]] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
[postBody appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"\r\n--%@",
stringBoundary] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
}
//Add the final components of the string.
[postBody appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"--\r\n",
stringBoundary] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
[request setHTTPBody:postBody];

Yes, this is a bit rough, but it seems to work OK.

Am I missing something here? Do you have the capability to post a form, or have you only developed an example where you can use a POST verb, but effectively only with URL parameters, similar to a GET verb?

Cheers
Simon