Save PDF which is displayed by UIWebView locally

Question

I have a UIViewController with an UIWebView which displays a pdf file depending which row was clicked before in an UITableView. Now I want to add a button for the user to save this pdf file locally for offline use. Then there is a second UITableView which should display the name of the saved pdf and by clicking on it another UIViewController appears and displays the saved pdf on a UIWebView offline. What would be a good way to start? Thanks

Answer 1

You can try this way:
1) Add a button to the View containing UIWebView
2) At button press save the file shown in UIWebView
(note: in iOS 5 you must save data that can be easily recreated or downloaded to the caches directory)

- (IBAction)buttonPress:(id)sender
{
    NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSCachesDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
    NSString *cachePath = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
    BOOL isDir = NO;
    NSError *error;
    //You must check if this directory exist every time
    if (! [[NSFileManager defaultManager] fileExistsAtPath:cachePath isDirectory:&isDir] && isDir   == NO)
    {
        [[NSFileManager defaultManager] createDirectoryAtPath:cachePath withIntermediateDirectories:NO attributes:nil error:&error];
    }
    NSString *filePath = [cachePath stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"someName.pdf"]
    //webView.request.URL contains current URL of UIWebView, don't forget to set outlet for it
    NSData *pdfFile = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:webView.request.URL];
    [pdfFile writeToFile:filePath atomically:YES];
}

3) On application start you need to check what files are stored (iOS can delete cache directory if there is not enough space on iPhone)