使用JSON将数据从MYSql导入我的iOS应用程序

Question

Ok I found a few questions on how to get data from a MYSql database into an iOS app, but I am just asking a few best practices here. I know these can all be separate questions, but I am hoping that they can be answered in a way that they relate to each other.

Am I correct to understand that to be able to get data into an iOS app - I need to first generate a JSON file, have that stored on a server and than have the app download this file??

If the previous answer is NO then does that mean, I can pull in data on the fly?

Lastly I have seen PHP examples to create JSON files, but iOS is in Objective-c. Does this mean I need to load a UIWebView to be able to load the PHP page that generates the file?

What I have:

I have a MYSql database - it is set up through PHPMyAdmin, so I am not familiar enough with the creation process of the database yet. I will look into that.

I can also export the JSON file from PHPMyAdmin, but that is no good to me in a iOS app.

I also have the parsing from a JSON file into an iOS app sorted, but I want to be able to do this on the fly instead of creating potentially hunderds of files.

I hope someone can help me here:-)

I am not necessarily asking for code, but would be mad to ignore it:-)

Answer 1

The problem is that there are not any iOS libraries for directly connecting to a MySQL server; and you really wouldn't want to do that, anyway. So, you need an intermediary server capable of sending data in a format your iOS application can understand. Note, this does not mean the data has to be JSON formatted. But it is very easy to use JSON as the format for your data. Most languages have native support for generating JSON from its native object format(s).

Once you have a server capable of sending data in your preferred format, you need to write some way for your iOS application to retrieve it. You do not have to use a UIWebView for this. As mentioned, the NSURLConnection framework is very easy to use to make such a request. However, there are a lot of other factors to consider when making network requests and others have already done most of the work for you. I like using the AFNetworking framework in conjunction with JSONKit. AFNetworking makes asynchronous calls to remote web services very easy, and JSONKit is nicer than NSJSONSerialization in my opinion.