I'm working on web application which, among other things, needs to save small file to particular folder on user's hard drive whenever user clicks a button. That file will serve as input for another desktop application so it must be saved in predefined folder and predefined format. "Save as..." and save dialog would be very inconvenient. Also setting that all downloads go to that folder would be troublesome.
Also, changing desktop application is not an option.
In current stage of web browsers and web standards what would be the best approach?
Is it development of custom plug in for browser? Or flash/silverlight? Something else?
First of all this is not doable via http and html.
If this is a controlled environment maybe you could get away with simply providing a customized portable firefox to your users. Of course, all other downloads would go to that folder as well.
Anything thats loaded from a website isn't allowed to access the computers HD, and with good reason.
That aside; Could you give it a new extension and associate a program with it that saves it in the correct place, all the user then needs to do is check 'always do this action' or something to open the file with the program when the button is clicked.
Perhaps a different approach would be to have the desktop application retrieve the file from your web-application when it needs it - is this feasible?
This approach means you need not concern yourself with the sandboxing protection of web browsers that prevent web-applications knowing too much about the clients file-system.
Related
Is there any way to save a file (to be exact, a .csv) somewhere outside the application sandbox? From what I've read it seems like it is only possible to save files inside the sandbox.
Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way, maybe I don't really need to save it outside the sandbox. What I actually need to do is:
Allow the user to save the file, so that he can use it in other applications (for example email client), and it would be best if the file would stay on his device after he deleted the app. The location of the saved file doesn't really matter, it could be chosen by user with some file picker or hard-coded. Is there any way to achieve this?
I'm using xamarin.forms so solution easy to implement in xamarin.forms would be much appreciated.
From what I've read it seems like it is only possible to save files inside the sandbox.
That is the general idea. You don't just have access to the filesystem on iOS. You could work around this by maybe saving it to iCloud or Dropbox, etc. depending on your use-case but basically you can't just save it somewhere common. Normally, you would then implement the 'share' functionality. What happens then is that iOS copies the file into the other apps' sandbox so it can work with it.
Context/Background: I have an iOS app with a Firebase backend. Each user on the app has a couple of public stories or journals. I am working on the v2 of the app and one of the main features of v2 is to give users the ability to publish their stories as static webpages by a click of a button. The goal is to have a journal for a user with a username "johnhouse", for example, be available at www.the-app-domain.com/johnhouse.
Question: How do can I create web pages on the fly from an iOS app? Im not sure where to start. Which online services should I look at?
I thought of spinning up a server and hosting www.the-app-domain.com on it, getting the app to ssh into the server and creating a directory called "johnhouse" (from the example above) inside the website's root directory and then pasting an index.html file inside it, But this doesn't only sound like a bad idea, it also sounds complicated as hell If I were to generate the html files on the app, how would I get them to the server? how would I get them into the right location?
There are a great many ways you might implement this behavior but I'll suggest one.
Consider what this product might look like if the app had no knowledge of how these static pages were published. All the app needs to be able to do is allow users to set which of their stories are published or not and to inform those users of the url at which their published stories will be available.
There may be real advantages to removing the app from your page-creation process.
If you find that you need to make change to the formatting of your pages you can do so without requiring an app update and you can choose if you want to rebuild every page or just have changes apply to new pages. This might be important if you discover that your pages don't render well on some devices or are not indexed the way you would like by search engines.
If you need to change where your pages are hosted you can do so (and provide redirects from the old location) without needing everyone to update to a new app version.
If you need to add moderation or curation of the content you publish you can do so more easily than if clients (your app) have direct control of your site content. This may be important when someone starts publishing SEO spam links to your site, or registers the username admin or login, or publishes a story containing malicious javascript, or publishes content which gets you a copyright infringement notice.
You don't need to give clients direct access to your web server which could allow them to edit each other's content or overwrite your site with their own malicious content.
Since you're already using Firebase take a look at how you might run your own web server as another client of this backend. One which looks for "published" stories (however you identify those in your data model) and generates appropriate pages for them. Depending on the tools you elect to use these could be dynamically generated pages (client side js or a web app) or static pages build by some backend process periodically or whenever stories change and added to a web server. Without any idea what server side tools would be most appropriate for you it's hard to know what specifically to suggest here.
I have the application that will connect to different servers. Each server is like different client and I want my app to look different (as far as I can) depending on which server it is connected to. I thought that I can have a ZIP that on handshake will be returned from destination server and use details from it e.g. Images, settings etc.
Is it possible, if so what is the limit?
Edit
I'm thinking about the images for logo etc. and some color lists that I can then use with fallback to defaults.
You can make all resources (images, string files, NIBs, storyboard...) be downloaded from the client server.
Also, there are several project developed exactly for dynamic design using CSS-like mechanisms:
http://www.pixate.com
http://www.freestyle.org
https://github.com/robertwijas/UISS
https://github.com/tombenner/nui
There are some project to run Javascript as well. This may allow you customise some business logic.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/javascriptcore-example/
https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/JavaScriptBridge
So, yes. It's possible, but you'll find some limitation, like the root view controller, the app delegate, etc.. You'll have to be creative.
I've never done something similar, so I can help any further then this.
It's possible for almost all elements of the application except:
Application name
Application icons
Application splash
screens
Those 3 items are bundled into application and can't be changed in runtime.
Rest of the items have so called appearance selectors that can be used to implement dynamic branding.
It is definitely possible, as I have worked on an App like this myself. We did it basically the same way you described. On startup the user selects a server to connect to and we download a zip file that contains all the assets for that client. After the download, the UI is loaded with the custom images. You can customize any UI element the system lets you, which is pretty much everything, except for minor details like the system StatusBar. You're gonna need some helper classes that make your life easier and support methods like, for example, [UIButton themedButtonWithImage:].
Well, it's possible — in one extreme, you could have an app which consists entirely of a UIWebView (plus some mechanism for selecting which server the app is talking to) that gets almost all it's content from the server.
There are performance considerations if you do (internet connection reliability, cost, and speed), and Apple may object to certain things being done on any app distributed through the app store, but assuming you follow their guidelines or distribute outside the store, the only limits that I know of are the app icon, the startup screen, and the app identifier, which have to be included in the bundle.
I'm trying to do something a bit complicated and I'm not entirely sure how to go about it. Could you please give me some pointers on the tech I should use and how I should go about implementing this. Here's what I need to do:
Create an iOS app that allows the user to upload pictures from his camera roll and modify variables with sliders. (so far so good)
These variables and graphics are used to modify some htlm5 code (i.e. the graphics the user supplies are called by the hmtl code and the variables modify some set variables in the script) (Do I just edit the code as a string?)
The code is put together and uploaded to a server where it is accessible at a unique URL. The user can save multiple times and each time it creates a new URL. (Do I need an FTP here?)
Your question is too general, but as far as I can help, Yes you have to create and edit some html source texts, and append every object that user is adding to the page as some html codes, files, css, etc.
and for uploading, if you want the user to upload the site to his/her own ftp server or web hosting service, yes you need FTP connection to create with the server.
But if you want your user to upload the website to a space you're providing for the user, then you need some server part and maybe some APIs. then you may use FTP or even some APIs to create and update files on your server. It highly depends on the service you want to provide.
I have a number of documents (mainly Word and Excel) that I'd like to make available to users of my Rails app. However, I've never tried something like this before and was wondering what the best way to do this was? Seeing as there will only be a small number of Word documents, and all will be uploaded by me, do I just store them somewhere in my Rails app (i.e. public/docs or similar) or should I set up a separate FTP and link to that? Perhaps there's an even better way of doing this?
If they're to be publically accessable, you definitely just want to stick them in public somewhere. Write a little helper to generate the URL for you based on however you want to refer to them in your app, for cleanliness (and so if you do change the URL later, for example to bucket your files to keep your directory sizes under control, you don't have to change links all over your app, just in one place.
If, on the other hand, your files are only for logged-in users, you'll need to use something like send_file to do the job, or one of the webserver-specific methods like the X-Sendfile header to check the user is authorised to view the file before sending it back to them.
I would do as you suggested and put them in public/docs. If you are planning on making an overview/index page for the files and link directly to them it would be easier if they were stored locally instead of a remote FTP server. However, since you are the one who will be uploading and maintaining these files, I think you should go with the option that's easiest for you.