Update app without redevelopment

[dogscot]

Hello everyone, this is my first post here. I have a question that I'm looking for possible solutions to. There might not even be a solution to this but I wanted to get people's feedback in case.

So basically I work for a company that sells luxury goods. We maintain a list of authorized retailers on our website. We also maintain the same list on our iPhone app. When the retailer list needs modifying, the market in question (ie Italy market, Germany market) logs into our CMS and has permission to edit the retailer list for that country. Ie. If the italian market logins to our CMS they can only add, change, or delete the retailer entries for Italy.

Now the problem is that when a market updates the retailer list on our website we have no easy way of updating our iPhone app with the same information. We outsource the development of our app and thus we need to contact our app design company every time we want to update our iPhone app, which you can imagine is not a particularly efficient way of doing this.

So I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for how to streamline this process. Below you will find some ideas that I have had but need elaboration on. The basic idea is how to update our app without needing our app design company or an employee who is familiar with app coding.

1. Is it possible to write a script that can update the retailer list for our iPhone app? (I know that an app update will still need to be deployed, but can the update be automatically produced ie. without collaboration from our app design company?)

2. Is it possible to have our CMS implement the changes to the iPhone app?(again I know we still need to organize a deployment, I'm just getting an idea of the options)

3. Could we have some from of content management site external to our current CMS? You would be able to login and edit the retailer list on this site. Then the site would automatically update our website through our CMS as well as make the changes to the iPhone app. Then we just need someone to deploy the app which is easy.

4. Are there any other ways to tackle this problem that I haven't considered?

Thanks very much for any help on this guys. Please don't hesitate to reply if you need clarification as well and I will get back to you asap.

[Meredi86]

If you are storing the list on the internet why isn't the app using a web service?

Using something like JSOn would mean that the changes would get pushed to the app every time the user loaded the app up. to make the app run faster you could have it perform a simple check to see if there has been an update before it goes and downloads the list.

Sounds like the development company in question is trying to keep you around as a long standing customer, maybe to increase their cash-flow, when they could have provided a much simpler, more efficient stand alone system that would only have needed redeveloping if you wanted to make a major update to the app i.e. UI changes.

But your description makes it sound very very possible to use a web service to do this, and those run dynamically.

For example my CloudBooks app will download a list of customers from the website or the user, if that list is then changed the next day, but in a browser rather than in the app then the user can simply click the "sync" button provided in order to download an updated list of their customers.

[timle8n1]

You should not be updating your app to update content that changes frequently. It should read that list from a server and if not connected use the last one it fetched.

Ideally your CMS would update the web and this XML or JSON file for the iPhone to match. The iPhone would attempt to pull it when the app was launched if not available for use the last copy - ship the app with a version so if yet aren't connected the first time they launch they have something.

[dogscot]

Great! Both of you, thank you very much. You have really clarified things for me. I think I can see how this solution is going to start coming together. If anyone has anything to add please don't hesitate to do so.

[Duncan C]

Originally Posted by dogscot

Great! Both of you, thank you very much. You have really clarified things for me. I think I can see how this solution is going to start coming together. If anyone has anything to add please don't hesitate to do so.

I agree with the other posters. Make this run off webservices.

If I was doing it, I'd design it to use Core Data to store the data locally.

I'd ship the app with a core data database that contained the current data as of the time of shipping. I'd put a revision number or timestamp on every record in the database, or perhaps on the whole database (depending on how the contents are changed.)

When the app launches for the very first time, it would copy it's built-in read-only database over to the documents directory and open it there.

Then it would drop into the normal launch behavior.

On each launch, it would send a query to the remove webservices server, asking if there were any changes since the local database was last updated. If yes, the server would send updated content, and the client would install the changes into the local database.

You can decide if you want to show the current contents on launch while waiting for updates, or display a message "checking for updates, please wait" That depends on whether or not the old data is of any use.

This is fairly standard stuff. You should think about changing developers if your developer didn't propose such a system from the start.

[dogscot]

Thank you very much Duncan. All the help I can get is appreciated. You have been very good at explaining things in detail. Thank you very much for your help.