A caching solution for iPhone application

Question

What I'm building is simply an application that fetches data over the web and displays them on the iOS views. Data are text and, sometimes, images / music files / movies.

I'd like to use some caching solution for the media. What it needs to do is:

• get an url of the file
• check if it's alredy downloaded in the cache storage, if it is, serve it
• if not, download it
• while also checking how much of the storage the current cache uses, and, if it's over the quota, delete oldest files

Best would be to have a simple interface for this - so I can just give an url and get the file of it (while files can change over time and reside on the same URL, so this should be handled too, in a perfect case).

Anyone knows a library to do it, on iPhone/iPad application?

Answer 1

You could try looking at using a UIWebview for the view. If I am understanding this correctly, you will be hosting your content on a web server and would simply like the iOS device to pull the content from the URL. This is what UIWebview is. It is essentially programmable access to Safari.

Answer 2

ASIHttpRequest has a DownloadCache option that may work for you. From their documentation:

* You want to have access to the data when there is no internet connection and you can't download it again
* You want to download something only if it has changed since you last downloaded it
* The content you are working with will never change, so you only want to download it once

This is what I used in my iPad app and it works pretty well.