http - Simple objective-c GET request

Question

Most of the information here refers to the abandoned ASIHTTPREQUEST project so forgive me for asking again.

Effectively, I need to swipe a magnetic strip and send the track 2 data to a webservice that returns "enrolled" or "notenrolled" (depending on the status of the card...)

So my data comes in simply as

NSData *data = [notification object];

And then I need to pass this to a url to the order of

http://example.com/CardSwipe.cfc?method=isenrolled&track2=data

And then just receive a response string...

I've searched a ton and there seems to be some conflicting answers as to whether this should be accomplished simply with AFNetworking, RESTkit, or with the native NSURL/NSMutableURLRequest protocols.

Answer 1

The options for performing HTTP requests in Objective-C can be a little intimidating. One solution that has worked well for me is to use NSMutableURLRequest. An example (using ARC, so YMMV) is:

- (NSString *) getDataFrom:(NSString *)url{
    NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init];
    [request setHTTPMethod:@"GET"];
    [request setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

    NSError *error = nil;
    NSHTTPURLResponse *responseCode = nil;

    NSData *oResponseData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&responseCode error:&error];

    if([responseCode statusCode] != 200){
        NSLog(@"Error getting %@, HTTP status code %i", url, [responseCode statusCode]);
        return nil;
    }

    return [[NSString alloc] initWithData:oResponseData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; 
}

Update:

Your question's title, and tagging say POST, but your example URL would indicate a GET request. In the case of a GET request, the above example is sufficient. For a POST, you'd change it up as follows:

- (NSString *) getDataFrom:(NSString *)url withBody:(NSData *)body{
    NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init];
    [request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
    [request setHTTPBody:body];
    [request setValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [body length]] forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Length"];
    [request setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

    /* the same as above from here out */ 
}