objective-cauthenticationhtml-parsinghpplemknetworkkit

Accessing files on password protected server

I've been retrieving documents from a public web server by going to the URL and parsing the HTML tree with TFHpple, like this:

NSData *documentsHTMLData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:myURL];
TFHpple *documentsParser = [TFHpple hppleWithHTMLData:documentsHTMLData];
....
....

The server is now being password protected and I was hoping to still be able to access it, perhaps using MKNetworkKit. I've got as far as:

MKNetworkEngine *myEngine = [[MKNetworkEngine alloc] init];
MKNetworkOperation *user = [myEngine operationWithURLString:myURL];
[user setUsername:@"test" password:@"test"];
[myEngine enqueueOperation:user];

but have no idea where to go from there with MKNetworkKit regarding how to then get access to directory structure.

I was hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction. Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Solution

  • If your server is password protected, you need to know the authentication scheme used. If your server uses HTTP Basic/Digest authentication, your code above should just work. If your server serves you a HTML page and asks you to type a username/password (aka, HTTP+HTML Form based authentication) you are out of luck, unless you reverse engineer and find a workaround.