CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpiosiphonefilefile-upload
PHPLover
PHPLover

Reputation: 12957

How to access/get data of the file uploaded through iPhone app in PHP?

I've developed a REST API in PHP which gets the POST request data from iPhone app.

I'm getting this POST request data in JSON format. I decode it and use it in PHP. Until here everything works fine.

My issue is regarding the data of uploaded file through iPhone app. How to access this uploaded file data in PHP?

If the file is uploaded from HTML form with enctype="multipart/form-data" and method=POST I get data of uploaded file in $_FILES array.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 424

Answers (1)

Rob
Rob

Reputation: 437872

You say:

If the file is uploaded from HTML form with enctype="multipart/form-data" and method=POST I get data of uploaded file in $_FILES array.

In iOS, you can create a multipart/form-data request (see these Stack Overflow answers to see how this is done in Objective-C and Swift, respectively). If you do that, then no change is necessary to the PHP code, and the uploaded file will be accessible via PHP's $_FILES variable, exactly like it is from the HTML form.

But earlier you said:

I'm getting this POST request data in JSON format.

Above, I pointed out that you could just create a request with a Content-Type of multipart/form-data from the iOS code which would make the file available via PHP's $_FILES variable. But that means, though, that the request would not be JSON.

If you want your web service to employ JSON, only, then the iOS code would instead create a request with a Content-Type of application/json. And the body of that request would not be multipart request, but rather just plain JSON. And, if you did that, then the PHP code could not use $_FILES, but rather would json_decode the response and parse the data out of that. Worse, you cannot include arbitrary binary data in a JSON element value, so the iOS code would have to convert the binary data to text before putting it into the JSON when the request was created (e.g. via base-64) and then the PHP code would grab the base 64 encoded value, then decode it before saving it.

Frankly, that is a lot more work (and the request will be 33% larger as a result of the base-64 encoding process), so I'd be inclined to have the file upload use the multipart/form-data outlined earlier rather than creating a JSON-based file upload process.

Upvotes: 1

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