Dynamic content within iOS App? [closed]

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I’m creating an iOS app for a local restaurant though which users can view the menu. The restaurant would like the ability to update the menu dynamically (ie. without having to go through the full Apple release procedure). In my mind this should be pretty simple, there could be a JSON/Plist file hosted online which the app accesses when presenting the menu, it could store the data locally then each subsequent time it could just check the version number to see if it’s changed and update accordingly. (Alternatively it could just download and present the whole thing every time since the files likely to be tiny).

The bit I’m struggling with is where to host the file (where I can update it occasionally) and how to access it within the app. Seems a lot of work writing a server and an API for one small file. Could it be put on Dropbox and accessed from there or is that likely to be unreliable?

For anyone else reading this I found the perfect solution - https://github.com/mattt/GroundControl

Answer 1

You could host the menu on an appache webserver and everytime the app is started you check the current version of the file on the device against the one on the server and download it if the version number is above that one.

Read a .plist file to a NSDictionary:

NSDictionary *menu = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:@"menu.plist"];