Does anyone know of a good alternative to the WE control for uploading files? The one that comes with Xojo is killing me. I wrote an app that allows users in the field to upload images to a server and the web uploader works great on Mac, PC and Android devices but it has been nothing but problems on iPhones.
First, whenever the user selects a file, it displays “image.jpg” in the list instead of the actual file name.
Second, if the user selects more than three files to upload the page freezes when the Fileupload1 is called.
Third, if the user tries to upload any files using Chrome on iPhone the page freezes when Fileupload1 is called.
None of these problems exist on other devices. I opened a thread on the first issue and Xojo’s response was that it’s an Apple problem and it probably is but unfortunately if you want to swim in Apple’s pond you have to play by Apple’s rules. We use iPhones and there are hundreds of other apps that are able to display file names correctly so I know it can be done. The other two problems I seriously doubt are Apple’s fault. If the control can upload one, two or three files then why does it freeze on more than three? If it works in Chrome on Android devices why not Chrome on Apple? Again, this works on non iDevices.
I love Xojo and they have a great group of developers but from reading the forums I’ve found that more often than not Xojo responds with “It’s a problem with xyz vendor and there’s nothing we can do about it” or “that’s just the way it was designed to work” rather than “we’ll look into it and see if we can find a workaround”.
So…is there an alternative control or plugin I can buy to upload files to a web server similar to this one?
Chrome uses the same browser engine as Safari on iOS devices- it is just a UI layer on top of the same browser because of Apple’s rules. Chrome on other devices uses Google’s own rendering engine.
The naming issue is related to the multiple upload issue (all being image.jpg)- and it is indeed the way Apple has setup file uploading to work. Apple has not given much thought to file uploading in mobile Safari as others have. It is annoying to web developers beyond just Xojo:
I’ll see if I can help you with a workaround, but the core here is Apple forcing the same name no matter the different file…
Thanks Travis. I can probably live with the naming problem. I’m having my application append a random six-digit number to the filename that is uploaded so that they don’t overwrite each other. The problem of the page freezing when more than three files are selected for upload is the pressing issue.
Unfortunately jQueryFileUploader won’t work as it is JavaScript based and Apple doesn’t support that on iPhone.
Since we had talked about this off forum if anyone else wants to know: mobile safari stops responding entirely during http uploads (unlike other browsers). That means you can lose the connection to the web app.
So no matter the upload technique/component- you need to keep uploading time to a minimum to maintain that connection.
That’s why a one-file-at-time workflow is necessary if you need to support photo uploads (the only type supported as of this date) through iOS.
The whole demo app shouldn’t be hanging. I’ll look into it.
However, jQueryFileUpload does not currently support iOS. I’ll look into whether or not that can be changed, but at the time I wrapped it for Xojo it did not work on iOS.
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3
Browser:Mobile Safari 5.1
[quote=79092:@Lee Page]If i spoof my user-agent in mozilla firefox to:
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3
Browser:Mobile Safari 5.1
jQueryFileUpload doesn’t work at all[/quote]
Nope. I check for iOS and turn it off due to problems that would occur if it was left on. This is noted in the docs.
That said, it looks like the latest version of the underlying control does support iOS. It’s time to revisit and update this one.
