How to connect iOS App to Symfony2 RESTful Webservice? - ios

Question

I have an iOS app that is working and able to connect to a RESTful PHP Webservice. The webservice was initially built in native PHP and now I am migrating it to a Symfony2 web service. On the iOS side, I am sending requests as JSON, the server processes the data and returns a JSON response data, everything works pretty well.
Now, my symfony2 webservice is able to respond with the correct response to requests made from the browser window or terminal using httpie (for testing) and it returns json data in the browswer window if I specify .json in the parameters. However, I am not sure how to make the iOS app send the request rather than the browser. I am using the FOSRestBundle if that information is of any significance. Here is an example from the terminal:
http http://serveripaddress/web/app_dev.php/users/1.json Accept:application/json
It returns json data representation of the user with the id = 1 as expected:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, DELETE
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 20:15:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=n8o72oq61isruuov1bqgc9udf5; path=/
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
X-Debug-Token: 6c3818
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.10-1ubuntu3.8
{
"id": 1,
"last_name": "Robinson",
"first_name": "Jack",
....More data truncated ...
}
From my browser, I can get the same result by using: http://serveripaddress/web/app_dev.php/users/1.json in the address bar. How can I make the iOS app send the same request? I guess the only change I need is in the symfony2 code to accept the request? Kindly give a brief example and I can figure out the rest from the example.
Edited with more detail:
Just to clarify, what I need is how to initiate a connection to the server-side REST Symfony2 application. Again, this I have previously done when using native PHP but how do I connect to a Symfony2 route? While using the native version, what I did was to construct a dictionaryWithObjectandKeys passing key value pairs of the command (on the PHP side) and the arguments as JSON and having the server side return JSON data response and a success or failure, simple and straightforward. How can this be done if I am using Symfony2 which I guess the commands now become a route? I am using AFNetworking and everything on the iOS client side should not need changes except the part where I connect to Symfony2. Kindly give an example to give me a concrete picture.

Answer 1

You can use AFNetworking 2 for example. It is a complete framework that allows you to consume web services (and more).
By the way, you could simply use (and fire) NSURLRequest, but if your application interact a lot with a webService i recommend to use AFNetworking. (Trust me, it is really something that you want to know how to use if you want to make apps on iOS)

Answer 2

I think binding to session and cookies may violate REST nature. I strongly recommend you to use something like WSSE. You can use EscapeWSSEAuthenticationBundle for WSSE. Or create your own.
Also useful link to dive deep:
How to create a custom Authentication Provider
Configure WSSE on Symfony2 with FOSRestBundle