iOS Apples Dirty Trick: NSXMLDocument...

Just a heads up to developers who have been pouring their heart and soul into their iPhone applications and have been stuck being able to only test it using the Aspen Simulator... I might have some bad news for you...

If you've been successfully using NSXMLDocument and have come to rely on it working just like it does in the simulator get ready for a huge let down when you discover your beloved application refuses to compile under the "iPhone" build style (as opposed to the "Aspen Simulator" build style)...

The really frustrating part is you can't even use the 'iPhone Device' build style (and discover your program fails to compile) until you pay your 99 bucks (and ADC approves you -- and you do all the 'stuff' needed to build and test your app on the iPhone/iPod)

Anyway, all is not a total loss.... NSXMLParser **is** included in the simulator *and* the iPhone/iPod hardware... It's not quite as simple as just stuffing your xml data into an NSXMLDocument and using all kinds of cool search methods that come along with NSXML* but its pretty much all we have to fall back on at this point... Unless you wanna try and figure out how to use libxml2 all by its lonesome.... I have a hard enough time with cocoa thank you very much and after looking at libxml2 and the kind of hoops you have to jump thu NSXMLParser was really a breeze!

Hope this helps!

Dave

stadidas said:

As I understand it, they removed NSXMLDocument for being too heavyweight for the iPhone. This is rather annoying as I was planning to make rather heavy use of it. XML Parser is ok for reading, but if you need to write XML then that's a no go. I guess anyone wanting to utilise a SOAP service is up the creek now.
If you do just need to read XML, there's always this: http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/wiki/TouchXML

Click to expand...

I don't have any problem with 'hand rolling' a SOAP request... It's really nothing more than a HTTP request with a set of commands wrapped up in an xml string. I simply use NSURLConnect and build my body (xml) by hand. Yea its messy but for the stuff I'm using it for it works okay.

Dave