I have a requirement to sharing files (PDF,PPT,Word etc.) from my App, I know we can get them from Drop Box, Google Drive, Box, iCloud etc..
Is there any SDK provided by iOS which we can handle locally with out downloading other Framework. For example the new WhatsApp feature having the share document.
The UI and all seems to be from Native SDK, how can we access it ?
If you want to pickup documents to your application, you can see UIDocumentPickerViewController and UIDocumentMenuViewController
Take a look at :
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIDocumentPickerViewController_Class/
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIDocumentMenuViewController_Class/
You have to make a Share extension, then if the user has those apps, the extension will be able to easily share your contents.
Take a look at :
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Share.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014214-CH12-SW1
If your documents are from a known source and have to be downloaded and uploaded, you also can do a Document provider extension.
Take a look at :
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/FileProvider.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014214-CH18-SW1
Related
I am new on iOS. In my application, I need to get files on the phone e.g. pdf, words etc in the phone. I know iOS application has their own sandbox to work with, they have no idea of other applications.
I have read some of the extension : Document Provider and a older post importing document through this link : https://mobiforge.com/design-development/importing-exporting-documents-ios
Is there any different between the two setup in my requirement? Sorry this is my first time working on iOS.
Unfortunately, iOS does not allows to share files storage between apps from two different developers.
If you own both apps, you can use App Groups to share data and files between apps. You can read more about App Groups, and how to use the APIs here https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/watch/working-with/app-groups/
I have an app that downloads files from a web server. Our customer wants the ability to edit those files on their mobile devices and upload the edited version to our servers. Is this possible in iOS? I have figured out how to allow users to view the files in external apps, but I don't see a way to bring back their changes if the file was modified as it seems to copy the file into the other app's space, so my app is left with the unaltered version.
iOS has a sandbox mechanism, so for sure you can not modify any file in another app.
The only way to transfer data from different app is using sharing.
This is a sample project I wrote for implement sharing on iOS, check it:
Sample for sharing on iOS
Hope it can help you.
How can I find out programmatically all the files present in iOS device and list them out to user? Also I need to download the file in my local application database?
How this can be achieved with Objective-C.
You cannot access all files in an iOS device outside the sandbox of the app. But there are other ways you can achieve this. What you can do is:
Access all the files in Gallery using UIImagePickerController.
Access all the user files in network- Dropbox/Google drive/iCloud. They all have separate public APIs that can be downloaded and used to download/upload files in network.
In this way, you can access most of the user files and use the same in your application.
Simple answer : you can't (on a non-jailbroken device).
Each app is launched is in own sandbox and can't interact with the others apps, expect using API provided by Apple for app-communication (ex: extension)
You should look at that Apple guide about App Sandboxing, which is valid for OSX and iOS apps.
The main difference between these two OS, as quoted directly from the doc :
iOS Note: Because it is not for user documents, an OS X container
differs from an iOS container—which, in iOS, is the one and only
location for user documents. In addition, an iOS container contains
the app itself. This is not so in OS X.
You cannot access all the files outside the app sandbox. But, if they are available at some shared location(network), you can use third party libraries to access them. For eg.
1. For iCloud- iOS provides inbuilt framework of UIDocument
2. For dropbox- DropBoxAPI is available
3. For Google drive- there is a separate library to access files in the drive.
Hope this helps :)
In my app I have to upload files to server.
For that I need to view and choose files from my iPhone and iPad. (any kind of files i.e pdf , doc,dock , mp3 etc etc).
How can I get the path for these files and how can I choose them in my application.
Generally in iPhone Where are these files are stored? how we can fetch them in our application?
Is there any thing like UIImagePickerController to pick file from iPhone?
There are classes that allow you to interact with various media types that may be on an iOS based device.
As you mention UIImagePickerController.
For music, you can use a similar class: MPMediaPickerControllerDelegate.
With regard to other arbitrary documents;
There is no device-wide document store, and you cannot access files stored inside another app's app bundle, thus you cannot access saved PDF/doc files. There is no shared place for the user to save such PDFs in the first place. Which is why media libraries have specific APIs to access them because they are device-wide libraries.
The most you can do is register your app as a viewer of PDF documents. This would allow other apps to open a PDF in your app if they use a UIDocumentInteractionController.
Your best option is probably to use File Sharing which will allow your application to own files on the device which can be synced via iTunes.
This will enable you to create your own UI, to present these files from your applications document folder.
Further reading: iOS File System Basics, File System Programming Guide.
I'm making a video decoder application on iOS using Xcode 4.2.
On click of a button I need to choose an input file to decode from a list of files.
Since there is no File Manager or File Browser on iOS, is there any way to go about this?
As others have pointed out, there is no iOS file manager. What there is the FileManager class. This class provides you the ability to:
get read-only access to items in your app package
get read/write access to your app's sandboxed container
You cannot access files elsewhere on the device, nor files belonging to other applications.
Some iOS applications (camera, pictures, contacts, etc) can be interacted with in a limited fashion by iOS API's that apple provides for that purpose. You can get more information about this in the apple developer docs online.
Thus, if your files are in your local app sandbox you can use FileManager to manually build a UI that allows users to see lists of the files there and pick one. They key being "you can build" on top of FileManager's functions for accessing the file tree.