Making Liferay and Custom Portlet Services Available in Your iOS App

Your iOS app is no doubt pretty great, or at least off to a great start. Now you want it to access Liferay services. How do you accomplish this? Use Liferay’s iOS Mobile SDK, of course! You must install the correct Mobile SDKs in your iOS project to call the remote services you need in your app. You should first install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK. This is required for any app that leverages Liferay. To call your custom portlet’s services, you also need to install the Mobile SDK that you built for it. For instructions on building a Mobile SDK for your custom portlet, see the tutorial Building Mobile SDKs.

This tutorial shows you how to install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK, and any custom built Mobile SDKs. First, you’ll learn how to use CocoaPods to install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK. You’ll then learn how to install a Mobile SDK manually, which is required for installing any custom built Mobile SDKs. Now go forth and fear no remote service!

Installing the SDK Using CocoaPods

Using CocoaPods is the simplest way to install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK. The steps for doing so are shown here:

Make sure you have CocoaPods installed.
Create a file called Podfile in your project. Add the following line in this file:
```
 pod 'Liferay-iOS-SDK'
```
Run pod install from your project’s directory. This downloads the latest version of the Liferay iOS Mobile SDK and creates a .xcworkspace file. CocoaPods also downloads all the necessary dependencies and configures your workspace. Note that you may have to run pod repo update before running pod install; this ensures you have the latest version of the CocoaPods repository on your machine.
Use the .xcworkspace file to open your project in Xcode.
If you’re importing dependencies as frameworks (use_frameworks! in your Podfile), you need to import the LRMobileSDK module:
```
 @import LRMobileSDK; // (Objective-C)
 import LRMobileSDK // (Swift)
```

For more information on how CocoaPods works, see their documentation. Next, you’ll learn how to install a Mobile SDK manually.

Installing an iOS SDK Manually

You can also install Mobile SDKs manually. This is required if you built one for your custom portlet’s services. You can also install install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK manually if you don’t want to use CocoaPods.

To install Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK, first download the latest version of the Liferay iOS Mobile SDK ZIP file. If you built your own Mobile SDK, find its ZIP file on your machine. This is detailed in the Building Mobile SDKs tutorial.
Unzip the file into your Xcode project.
Within Xcode, right-click on your project and click Add Files to ‘Project Name’.
Add the core and v62 folders. Note the v62 folder’s name can change for each Liferay version. In this example, the SDK is built for Liferay 6.2.
If you’re manually installing Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK, it also requires AFNetworking 2.5.3. Add its source code to your project.

Great! Now you know how to manually install a Mobile SDK in your iOS apps.

Understanding Liferay and iOS Compatibility

Each Liferay Mobile SDK is designed to work with a specific Liferay Portal version. The Liferay Mobile SDK version number reflects this. The first two digits of each Mobile SDK’s version number correspond to the compatible Liferay version. For example, a Mobile SDK version 6.2.* is compatible with Liferay 6.2, while a Mobile SDK version 7.0.* is compatible with Liferay 7.0. Any digits after the first two correspond to the internal Liferay Mobile SDK build.

The Mobile SDK’s service class names are also suffixed with the Mobile SDK’s version number. This lets your app support several Liferay versions. For example, you can add Mobile SDK versions 6.2.0.22 and 7.0.3 to the same project. The Mobile SDK service classes supporting Liferay Portal versions 6.2 and 7.0 end in _v62.m and _v7.m, respectively. To find out the Liferay versions your app connects to, use the [LRPortalVersionUtil getPortalVersion:...] method.

The Liferay iOS Mobile SDK is compatible with iOS versions 7.0 and up. Older iOS versions may work, but compatibility is untested.

Making Custom Portlet Services Available in Your iOS App

If you want to invoke remote web services for your custom portlet, then you need to generate its client libraries by building an iOS Mobile SDK yourself. Building an SDK is covered in the tutorial Building Mobile SDKs. Once you build an SDK to a ZIP file, you can install it using the manual installation steps above (make sure to use the ZIP file you built instead of Liferay’s prebuilt ZIP file). Note that because your custom built SDKs contain only the client libraries for calling your custom portlet services, you must install them alongside Liferay’s prebuilt SDK. Liferay’s prebuilt SDK contains additional classes that are required to construct any remote service call.

Building Mobile SDKs

Service Builder and Services

Creating Android Apps that Use Liferay

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