Updating Plist file via download iOS - ios

Question

I've got a quiz app on the Apple app store. The questions are stored in a Plist file. What I'm looking to do is find a way to update the Plist file via downloading a new version and not having to submit an update every time I have new questions to add
Does anyone know of a decent tutorial which may help me?
Many thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure about tutorials, but the steps to achieve what you describe are pretty simple:
Create a url request to your remote data
Parse the returned data
Write the parsed data to a new local plist
Eg:
// Create a NSURL to your data
NSString *dataPath = #"www.mydata.com/path";
NSURL *dataURL = [NSURL URLWithString:dataPath];
// Create an asycnhronous request along with a block to be executed when complete
[NSURLConnection sendAsynchronousRequest:[[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:dataURL]
queue:[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init]
completionHandler:^(NSURLResponse *response, NSData *data, NSError *error)
{
if (error) {
NSLog(#"%#", error.localizedDescription);
// Handle the request error
}
else {
// We have some data, now we need to serialize it so that it's usable
NSError *serializationError;
NSDictionary *serializedDictionary = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:0 error:&serializationError];
if (serializationError) {
NSLog(#"%#", serializationError.localizedDescription);
// Handle the serialization error
}
else {
// We have a serialized NSDictionary, now we just want to write it
// First we create the path to write it to, eg. uers documents directory
NSURL *documentsDirectory = [[[NSFileManager defaultManager] URLsForDirectory:NSDocumentDirectory inDomains:NSUserDomainMask] lastObject];
// Then write it
BOOL success = [serializedDictionary writeToFile:documentsDirectory.path atomically:YES];
if (!success) {
NSLog(#"Error writing file");
}
}
}
}];
Note: You may want to think about storing your data in a remote database like Parse. This way you can query for new questions and only download those so you're not using unnecessary bandwidth. You may also want to consider using Core Data to maintain your local data rather than writing it to a plist. The main advantage being that you don't have to serialise the entire plist into memory to use it - you can just query for the particular questions you need.
Hope this helps.