[iPhone] How would one send data to an http server?

Question

Hello,
I would like to be able to send data (maybe XML?) to be processed by a server-side script.
NSURLRequest seems to be mainly for downloading data, not uploading... A simple "ajax" request would do, so I would just serialize the data and send it in a POST variable. How do I implement such a request using the SDK?

Answer 1

This what iam doing to post XML and to receive an XML response from our servers. Note that the Content-Type is set to text/xml. If your post data is different, set the type accordingly.
Also i am using *NSURLConnection -> sendSynchronousRequest* class method to block for the response. You can also do asynchronous read of the response by creating a NSURLConnection object and setting a delegate which will listen for the incomming network events. Check the documentation for NSURLConnection .
Hope this helps,
-TRS
// This method takes an XML post data and returns the response XML from server
// Note that if you want to post binary data then just send postData instead of
// postString as input parameter
- (NSString *) postData: (NSString *) postString toURL:(NSString *) url {
NSData *postData = [postString dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]
cachePolicy:NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringCacheData timeoutInterval:10];
NSString *postLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [postData length]];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
[request setValue:postLength forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Length"];
[request setValue:@"text/xml" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
[request setHTTPBody:postData];
NSURLResponse *response = nil;
NSError *error = NULL;
NSData *respData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];
NSString *responseString = nil;
if (!error && respData) {
if ([response isKindOfClass:[NSHTTPURLResponse class]]) {
int code = [((NSHTTPURLResponse *)response) statusCode];
if (code == 200) {
responseString = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:respData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] autorelease];
} else {
NSLog(@"
Error");
} else {
NSLog(@"
Error");
[request release];
return responseString;