Document Collaboration

Question

I am trying to make an iOS app which would involve 5 or so users connected to a single web document, with one of them editing it while the others received updates in realtime.

How can I make the app so that it can update its documents in realtime (without the user having to click a "sync" button)? It should work similar to shared google docs, when one user makes a change, it is instantly reflected in all users' copies, but it should run natively on iOS, not through a web browser.

I am not asking for a full app schematic or any code, I only need a nudge in the right direction.

Answer 1

I would suggest that you keep a master copy of the document on your server (and by the way, you will need a server in order to make this work effectively), and while the users edit a temporary version of the document that is stored locally on their iPhones, the server is constantly notified of changes when there is one, and when the version on the server is changed (if the version on the server isn't the same as the one on the device), the server sends a message using a special protocol that you will make to specify if

1. Content (text, image or something else) is added to the document
2. Content is removed from the document
3. Content is edited in the document
4. ... You get the point

All you need are different ways to notify the devices of different types of changes made to the server document. From those notifications, the user's temporary document can get changed according to what change was made to the server's version without having to constantly download the full document over and over. Every once in a while (or from manual user input), you can have the iPhone app request the full server document to make sure that all changes made on the iPhone are correct.

Use NSInputStreams and NSOutputStreams to receive and send messages to your server. Use an NSStreamDelegate to handle server events (its only instance method is an event handling method). This guide is an excellent start if you really don't know anything about sending messages. You can send and receive NSData and NSStrings in which you can store your protocol.

As an example of protocol, an app that I have created that receives and sends messages to and from a Windows server does the following:

1. When preparing the data to be sent on the iOS app, I first write 4 bytes of data to an NSData object that contain the length of the proceeding data so that the server knows exactly how many bytes to read from the stream. I chose 4 bytes since that's the size of an unsigned int type, which can represent very large numbers (and therefore very large data sizes).
2. I add the data to the NSData object. The data is in the form of a struct in my case. Really, you can send any type of data so long as you know how to parse it at the other end.
3. I send the NSData object.

Really, sending, receiving and parsing NSStream messages is very simple, but if you are writing server-client code for the first time for an iOS app, the process can seem daunting. I did simplify the process down quite a bit, because you also have to consider if the server is ready to receive messages, has space available for messages to be written and so on, but the guide that I linked to earlier, which is also right here, was quite helpful as I was writing my client-server app.

Hopefully these guidelines are general enough (and specific on the right topics) for your liking.