iCloudPlayground

Created by Leonhard Lichtschlag ([email protected]) on 13/Nov/11.
Copyright (c) 2012 Leonhard Lichtschlag. All rights reserved.

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iCloudPlayground is a simple app that tests iCloud APIs. You can use it as a tutorial for simple iCloud tasks or to build upon for more advanced tasks.

To test this app you need to be either in the RWTH Aachen University team, or have access to another development team. If so,

1. go to the provisioning profile and be sure that for your app identifier is iCloud enabled,
2. exchange the app identifier in the info.plist,
3. exchange the identifiers in the iCloud entitlements file,
4. and of course, set your own developer profile in the build setting.

iCloud will not work in the simulator, so you need to test on a real device. And for testing out merge conflicts, you probably need a second device set to the same iCloud user ID.

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iCloud allows two kinds of syncing:

1. The key-value storage is basically NSUserDefaults shared among all devices with the same iCloud ID. I implemented this in the first tab. Some things worth mentioning:

   • The delay until a change propagates to other devices can be around 1 minute, so don't be surprised it it does not show up instantaneously.
   • The sharing is on key by key basis, so if you switch the first on iPhone A and the second in iPhone B, both will be set in the end.
   • Without network access, the app still knows the old values, so no extra caching required.

2. The second sharing is on the basis of documents, see the second tab. I used the standard class UIDocument for this. Some special things to note here:

   • Document sharing is much faster. The API documentation speaks of aggressive pushing over the cloud, and they do mean it. You should see a new document created on device A on device B within seconds.
   • Each document can be made "public" by asking the NSFilemanager for a cryptic URL on www.icloud.com.
     • The link is built to be hard to guess and no password is required to access it.
     • The caller can specify a date until the document is accessible under this URL.
     • Changing the document on device will NOT update the shared version.
     • If it is deleted locally, however, it also is no longer shared online.
     • The call to make the document public can take a few seconds.
   • Sharing the document to other apps on the device with UIDocumentInteractionController is possible directly out of the iCloud container.
   • If the contents of the file are changed at the same time on two devices and then synced, iCloud picks the newest one and marks the other version as in conflict. Opening the file shows the wining contents.
     • UIDocument notifies this by reporting a merge conflict. It has to open the document once to notice this.
     • However, the merged document can directly be used again, the merge results in a working document.
     • Further changes to the winning document do not discard the merge conflict, so in theory one can still go back and pick the discarded changes from multiple edits back.
     • In a series of merge conflicts all discarded versions remain available. Say file contents "Apple" and "Banana" conflicted and "Apple" won. Then new edits in "Apple" with "Strawberry" conflicted again and "Apple" was again chosen as the winner. iOS then keeps and reports both previous conflicts.
     • This means that for large documents with many merge conflicts, the programmer has to take care to resolve/discard the conflicts, so that little space is wasted.
     • Browsing to the file location (~/Library/MobileDocuments/{AppIdentifier}/) on a sychronised Mac OS will only reveal merged versions.
   • In the iOS settings app and the iCloud pref pane on Lion, users can see space usage for the app.
     • If the documents are saved to {iCloud container}/Documents then the user can delete docs from there on a one by one basis without touching the rest of the iCloud container.
     • Or the user might clear the whole contents of the iCloud container of this app identifier, deleting documents and all other helper files.

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Possible expansions

• Display download status in file list.
• With a CoreData backed document, iCloud can supposedly do more sophisticated merging.