How do you allow very large files to have time to upload to firebase before iOS terminates the task? - ios

Question

I have a video sharing app, and when you save a video to firebase storage it works perfectly for videos that are roughly 1 minute or shorter.
The problem that I am having, is when I try to post a longer video (1 min or greater) it never saves to firebase.
The only thing that I can think of is this error that I am getting, and this error only shows up about 30 seconds after I click the save button:
[BackgroundTask] Background Task 101 ("GTMSessionFetcher-firebasestorage.googleapis.com"), was created over 30 seconds ago. In applications running in the background, this creates a risk of termination. Remember to call UIApplication.endBackgroundTask(_:) for your task in a timely manner to avoid this.
Here is my code to save the video to firebase.
func saveMovie(path: String, file: String, url: URL) {
var backgroundTaskID: UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier?
// Perform the task on a background queue.
DispatchQueue.global().async {
// Request the task asseration and save the ID
backgroundTaskID = UIApplication.shared.beginBackgroundTask(withName: "Finish doing this task", expirationHandler: {
// End the task if time expires
UIApplication.shared.endBackgroundTask(backgroundTaskID!)
backgroundTaskID = UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier.invalid
})
// Send the data synchronously
do {
let movieData = try Data(contentsOf: url)
self.storage.child(path).child("\(file).m4v").putData(movieData)
} catch let error {
fatalError("Error saving movie in saveMovie func. \(error.localizedDescription)")
}
//End the task assertion
UIApplication.shared.endBackgroundTask(backgroundTaskID!)
backgroundTaskID = UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier.invalid
}
}
Any suggestions on how I can allow my video time to upload?

Answer 1

Finally figured this out after a long time...
All you have to do is use .putFile("FileURL") instead of .putdata("Data"). Firebase documentation says you should use putFile() instead of putData() when uploading large files.
But the hard part is for some reason you can't directly upload the movie URL that you get from the didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo function and firebase will just give you an error. So what I did instead was get the data of the movie, save the movie data to a path in the file manager, and use the file manager path URL to upload directly to firebase which worked for me.
//Save movie to Firestore
do {
// Convert movie to Data.
let movieData = try Data(contentsOf: movie)
// Get path so we can save movieData into fileManager and upload to firebase because movie URL does not work, but fileManager url does work.
guard let path = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask).first?.appendingPathComponent(postId!) else { print("Error saving to file manager in addPost func"); return }
do {
try movieData.write(to: path)
// Save the file manager url file to firebase storage
Storage.storage().reference().child("Videos").child("\(postId!).m4v").putFile(from: path, metadata: nil) { metadata, error in
if let error = error {
print("There was an error \(error.localizedDescription)")
} else {
print("Video successfully uploaded.")
}
// Delete video from filemanager because it would take up too much space to save all videos to file manager.
do {
try FileManager.default.removeItem(atPath: path.path)
} catch let error {
print("Error deleting from file manager in addPost func \(error.localizedDescription)")
}
}
} catch let error {
print("Error writing movieData to firebase \(error.localizedDescription)")
}
} catch let error {
print("There was an error adding video in addPost func \(error.localizedDescription)")
}