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Seminar paper

iPhone App

clusterinfo.at

Stefan Almer, Bsc

stefan.almer@student.tugraz.at

Graz University of Technology

Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media

Adviser: Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Josef Kolbitsch

Graz, September 2010

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Abstract

Mobile devices such as Apples iPhone or various Google Android driven devices are

getting increasingly popular. With such devices and the possibility to access the internet

wirelessly it is possible to gain information everywhere on earth. For representing infor-

mation so called Apps (mobile applications) are used. Such applications are fast, easy to

use and often fit just one special purpose.

This paper deals with the implementation of the iPhone application clusterinfo.at. This

app represents the mobile userinterface to the existing web portal. To access the infor-

mation a REST based webservice API has been developed which provides various services

like searching. Every request is covered in a result set which only contains metadata about

the information found. The client needs to post a second request with the result set to getall records.

Keywords iphone, rest webservice, clusterinfo, human technology styria, xml

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Statutory Declaration

I declare that I have authored this thesis independently, that I have not used other thanthe declared sources / resources, and that I have explicitly marked all material which has been

quoted either literally or by content from the used sources.

Date Signature

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Contents

Contents

Contents i

List of Figures ii

List of Listings iii

1 Introduction 1

2 Implementation 2

2.1 Server-Side API . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2.1.1 Categories for section: /getBrowseCategories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2.1.2 Search: /search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.1.3 Result set: /getResultSet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.1.4 User in role: /isUserInRole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2.1.5 Promoted events: /getPromotedEvents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.1.6 Detail: /getDetail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.1.7 Error handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2.2 Client-Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.2.1 Newsticker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3 Functionality of the iPhone application 14

3.1 Sections/Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.2 Login - Cluster members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.3 Records details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.4 Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3.5 Newsticker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

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List of Figures

List of Figures

1 iPhone - Server: Request - Response example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Simple class-diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3 Section view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

4 Category view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

5 Section "person" - user not logged in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

6 Wrong password or username . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

7 User logged in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

8 Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

9 Event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1510 Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

11 Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

12 Search in section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

13 Search in category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

14 Static message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

15 Event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

16 Event detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

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Listings

Listings

1 Example response for all categories in section "event". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Result-Set for records in category "Kongress". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 Result-Set for search in category. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

4 Result-Set for search in section. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

5 Response from isUserInRole, the user has no rights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

6 Promoted events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

7 Details for "event" with ID 415 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

8 No/invalid API key provided . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

9 Wrong/too few arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1110 Access of secure service in public environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

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1 Introduction

1 Introduction

The clusterinfo.at iPhone application is the mobile access point for the existing clusterinfo.atweb portal and CRM system. For accessing the portal a completely new REST-API has been

developed which provides direct access to the database.

Like the web portal, the App allows the user to search the public database.

Further features:

Search in section: company, event, person

Search in category

Show address in map

Write in-app email

Open links in browser

Call telephone numbers

The section "person" is only available for cluster members.

This paper also provides a detailed documentation of the implemented REST webservice

API, the implementation of the client and an overview of the functionality of the application.

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2 Implementation

2 Implementation

The CIS (clusterinformation system) provides a REST webservice to access all information ofthe clustersystem. The webservice provides public and secure (HTTP-Basic-Auth, username/-

password) access over SSL (secure socket layer). The service responds with an XML document

encoded in ISO-8859-1 over the following URLs:

Public: https://www.clusterinfo.at/mobile/services/

Secure: https://www.clusterinfo.at/mobile/services/secure/

For several requests (e.g. /search) the webservice only returns a result set. In this case,

the webservice executes a query and returns an XML response with "metadata" about the

search like the "set id" generated on the server and the number of records found.

The set contains all records found (on the server). The results (records) can be requested

with another service later on - this means that not all records are returned intermediately to the

client. This mechanism has several advantages: fast and small response, instant information

about the search, "browsing" through the set or only get a range of records.

2.1 Server-Side APIThe server-side API provides the following services:

/getBrowseCategories (see 2.1.1)

/getResultSet (see 2.1.3)

/isUserInRole (see 2.1.4)

/search (see 2.1.2)

/getPromotedEvents (see 2.1.5)

/getDetail (see 2.1.6)

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