iOS Associate URL with Saved File

Question

My app parses an xml, and builds its own custom HTML from the contents of the article chosen in the XML. When I save an article, I have a class for the action, in which I pass the article title, and the custom HTML to strings within the Save class. The class takes that and saves it to the app using:

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);

    NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];

    NSString *pdfPath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:[thetitle stringByAppendingString:@".html"]];


    NSError *error = nil;
    [thehtmlcontents writeToFile:pdfPath atomically:YES encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&error];

The issue that I have is that if I want to share a saved article via Facebook or Twitter, I can't, because the URL doesn't get saved with everything else. I can pass over the URL easy enough to the Save class, but I'm unsure of what to do with it, so that it stays associated with the article itself. Suggestions?

Answer 1

I'd say you broadly have three options:

1. Attach some metadata to the file noting the URL it corresponds to
2. Write out a file format that encapsulates the URL, plus the HTML
3. Include the URL in the HTML in a manner such that you can retrieve it

no. 1 would probably be best achieved by setting an extended attribute on the file. However, I'm not sure how well iOS supports this, and there may well be issues with it not being preserved in the event of something like restoring the OS.

Are you in a position to implement no. 3 reasonably cleanly? I would say a <meta> tag near the top of the document is best for doing this.

All that said, how important really is it that your HTML is stored in files? To me, this sounds like it could easily be chucked into a dirt simple Core Data database.