Emoji icons interrupting REST call - ios

In testing out our API, one of our testers found out that when they insert an emoji icon on their iOS device, it will successfully save to our MongoDB, however when retrieving it they do not get a response. I confirmed this, and our server (Node.js) will get the request, and start to send the data, but (I think) somewhere along the line, the emoji characters "terminiate" the request, or cause it never to finish in the eyes of the iOS client.
Has anyone experienced this? If so what is the best way you've gotten around with dealing with emoji icons. I know one way is to unescape() every string that goes out from Node.js, but it seems like a not-so-clean approach, and also I'd need to decode the text on the client-side.

MongoDB supports utf8, unfortunately the emoji characters are utf8mb4 which many applications and languages don't yet support (including MongoDB). Unescape seems like the best thing to do currently.
Alternatively you could store it as binary, but then you would need to query it differently and wouldn't be able to query with regular expressions (but would retain the native characters).

Related

How can I use an online code compiler's output through in a code compiler app?

I want to make an app which compiles Swift code, so how can I use a website named www.swiftstub.com or any similar website to retrieve the output of the code? I want my app to have a simple UITextView in which the user can type the code. If a UITextView cannot be used, what can be used?
I want my app to send the code typed to this website, and then retrieve the output back and display it. How can this be done? Thanks!
Make an app that sends text to a server.
Have the server compile this code, run it, and capture the output.
Send this output back to the app.
Have the app display the output.
This is an extreme oversimplification, there are lots of things to consider, but these are kind of the big sections of whats there to to. You need to understand very well on the app side: UI and networking, and on the server side: triggering a compilation of text, capturing that output (command line, maybe Swift or Python can help you here) and HTTP(S) responses and requests (or sockets, even harder).
This does not sound like an easy task, so you are very courageous.
Build all components locally:
App:
- write an app with a textView and a button, and on the tap of that button, save the output to a textile. This is to avoid any networking complications at this point, later, instead of saving, you would send this to a server.
Server: (just build the things on your computer)
- write some script/program that can read in that textfile that was saved.
- Then you need to compile this code (lookup 'xcrun' on google) and capture the output. Save this output to a textile. Have your app load this file and display it.
The important thing to consider is the real server machine you will run this code on later: it has to be a machine that can compile, and execute Swift code. Currently, this means it has to be an OS X machine. This is hard to find, as most servers run linux, and there is no Linux Swift compiler yet.
Getting this to work would be a proof of concept: you can capture text from the app, you can grab this text and compile it, you can capture the output of the compilation, and you can have the app read that output and display it.
Once you've got this working, you would need to find a server that can do the compilation part, and run what you build to do that. Then you would need to write some code in your app that sends an HTTP request to your server containing this text, to which your server would respond with the output of that compilation.
As I said, this is a big undertaking, with lots of difficult parts and unexpected surprises, so don't expect this to be done in a couple of weeks, it will most likely be more like over six months.
Try to find someone who has experience on programming and setting up a server, that will really help you a lot.

Protect iOS Database information

I am busy writing a commercial electronic words-dictionary type of app for iPhone and iPad iOS7. The value of the app is really in the database that I worked many years on, and not so much the app itself. The database is very large (195mb on a windows computer before converted to something like SQLLite) and I and would like to know what is the best way to protect the data in it so the app can read it but other people cannot read/get to it. It seems most mobile developers use SQLLite, but the data can easily be read with a normal hex editor on it.
From this forum and others I gathered that SQLCipher is a good tool. My problem is that it SEEMS that SQLCipher encrypts the database, and then decrypts it when it needs to be read in a temporary file and then encrypt it again afterwards. If this is the case, I have two problems.
The database is very large and to decrypt it every time and encrypt again is going to make the app very slow.
What stops a hacker from reading/copy the decrypted (temp) file when it's available even for a short time?
Do I understand SQLCipher's working correctly, if so, is there any other tools/methods to encrypt/protect a database so that the program can still read it with SQL Queries without making the data so easily available in any way, or any other suggestions you might have?
Thank you
According to this page: http://sqlcipher.net/design they don't decrypt your database as a whole, so the answer to your question #1 is no. They claim about 5-15% overhead to the standard SQLite performance.
As for #2 - SQLCipher will decrypt database in pages, so theoretically - somebody can get access to that page in memory in decrypted way. However this would be true for any encryption method you use. Just think about it - even if you decrypt full database, your application would need to display/access some data from it, somehow at some point. And at this point data must be decrypted. The only question here - how much of the data will be decrypted at given moment.
The other alternative you have is to try to implement ecnryption/decryption yourself using standard SQLite and standard ecnryption library. You can for example encrypt each row (or even fields with sensitive data) individually and decrypt them when needed - but then again, at certain moment this particular row will be in the memory decrypted and visible to hacker.

What is the best way to implement dynamic search on the server from iOS application?

I'm struggling with a problem of implementing dynamic search.
Here what i want to achieve:
In my application there is an option that user (program manager) will be able to search his team members. Each PM has its account on the server side (web service) where it is a table team_members which contains all the team members that correspond to this manager.
Their amount can be more than hundreds.
And client side app which I develop has an option search team members.
I want to implement it dynamically:
e.g When the user print first letter a I make a query to the server and get all the matches with a letter: Antuan, BArrow, etc.
Then user print ab and I make a query which must return Abraham, Abdulla, etc. And so on. All the matching results is shown in UITableView.
HTTP query to server is made each time text in UITextField shanges. I implement it with dispatch_async: on UITextFieldTextDidChangeNotification I create a dispatch_async where i make an HTTP request with searchbar.text.
The problem: it works very slow. I often get an exception bad selector was sent to the instance.
So my question:
Why is my approach bad? What is a better solution for this?
Or dynamic search it is a VERY bad idea and I must do search only on clicking some button?
Thanks. I hope some experienced iOS developers will give me good advice.
Making an HTTP request every time someone types a character is probably never going to be fast enough (nor does it really make sense -- read on). For a certain size of list, the answer would be to pull over the whole list in the background as soon as you present the field (but before the user starts typing in it). Once you have the list, you can start matching, in memory, on the local device. "More than hundreds" isn't very specific, and it depends on network speed, but I'd guess that if your list is less than 50K in payload size, pulling the whole thing will be the easiest way.
If the list is too big for that to be practical, but the list limited by the first character the user types is not too big, then the best approach might be to wait for the first character, fire off your HTTP request asynchronously, and only start the dynamic match once you've received the response containing all items that start with that letter. One thing to keep in mind is this: if you have the list limited by the first character, that's the only HTTP request you ever have to make (unless the user changes the first character) because all possibilities starting with that letter will be in that list. From there, you can pare down the list locally without any further HTTP requests.
As for why you're getting exceptions, it's hard to say without seeing your actual code. Try setting an exception breakpoint in Xcode. This will allow you to stop in the debugger when the exception is thrown, which will show you what's causing it.

iOS notification and server cheking

I'm making a program for IOS for the first time. I never had a iPhone so I don't really get how it works...
I want to make my system able to call a webservice on the background and depending in the answer show a notification.
How can I do this?
I read on the Internet that I can push notifications to the phone, however that won't solve my problem because I want my server to track the user position, so it need the user to silently tell the server it's gps coordinates.
Thank you,
GustDD
I will suggest building the app first to run in the foreground. I will assume you already understand how to use the GPS, so will not go into detail on that.
First off, you will need to write the server backend and app pretty much simultaneously. There are many choices for writing the server backend language wise. I prefer python, others ruby on rails. You want to build a REST API for the server that the iDevice can talk to with simple HTTP protocol.
You must decide on the API. You must think about what kind of data you will want to send and receive and how you will wrap the data. Also what HTTP protocols will you be using for specific requests, like GET POST etc. Furthermore, you will have to decide at what URL's on the server will it be useful to GET or POST to depending on the data you want to send or receive. I would suggest you use JSON to wrap your data. It is quite intuitive and easy to encode and decode.
Next you will have to decide how to talk to the server in iOS. There are many great third party libraries that dress up NSURLConnection or you can use NSURLConnection itself (sometimes a bit tedious). I personally like to use AFNetworking. It will do the JSON decoding and encoding for you which is a big bonus.
Finally, once you have the two communicating with how you want and with the data you want, now time to dress it up. You can allow your app to run in the background and collect GPS data and send it. You can also use the notification center to display information it gets from the server in the background.
Update to Comment
This will be extremely helpful for you with background programming. From an Android perspective, iOS is a little bit different since there is not really a direct correlation for Android services in iOS. Every little detail to put your project together is in that link.

Document Collaboration

I am trying to make an iOS app which would involve 5 or so users connected to a single web document, with one of them editing it while the others received updates in realtime.
How can I make the app so that it can update its documents in realtime (without the user having to click a "sync" button)? It should work similar to shared google docs, when one user makes a change, it is instantly reflected in all users' copies, but it should run natively on iOS, not through a web browser.
I am not asking for a full app schematic or any code, I only need a nudge in the right direction.
I would suggest that you keep a master copy of the document on your server (and by the way, you will need a server in order to make this work effectively), and while the users edit a temporary version of the document that is stored locally on their iPhones, the server is constantly notified of changes when there is one, and when the version on the server is changed (if the version on the server isn't the same as the one on the device), the server sends a message using a special protocol that you will make to specify if
Content (text, image or something else) is added to the document
Content is removed from the document
Content is edited in the document
... You get the point
All you need are different ways to notify the devices of different types of changes made to the server document. From those notifications, the user's temporary document can get changed according to what change was made to the server's version without having to constantly download the full document over and over. Every once in a while (or from manual user input), you can have the iPhone app request the full server document to make sure that all changes made on the iPhone are correct.
Use NSInputStreams and NSOutputStreams to receive and send messages to your server. Use an NSStreamDelegate to handle server events (its only instance method is an event handling method). This guide is an excellent start if you really don't know anything about sending messages. You can send and receive NSData and NSStrings in which you can store your protocol.
As an example of protocol, an app that I have created that receives and sends messages to and from a Windows server does the following:
When preparing the data to be sent on the iOS app, I first write 4 bytes of data to an NSData object that contain the length of the proceeding data so that the server knows exactly how many bytes to read from the stream. I chose 4 bytes since that's the size of an unsigned int type, which can represent very large numbers (and therefore very large data sizes).
I add the data to the NSData object. The data is in the form of a struct in my case. Really, you can send any type of data so long as you know how to parse it at the other end.
I send the NSData object.
Really, sending, receiving and parsing NSStream messages is very simple, but if you are writing server-client code for the first time for an iOS app, the process can seem daunting. I did simplify the process down quite a bit, because you also have to consider if the server is ready to receive messages, has space available for messages to be written and so on, but the guide that I linked to earlier, which is also right here, was quite helpful as I was writing my client-server app.
Hopefully these guidelines are general enough (and specific on the right topics) for your liking.

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