Connecting to SharePoint’s Web Services from iOS

I got an email through my blog the other day which asked an interesting question. My reply bounced back, so I figured I’d post it here as well as in the SPServices Discussions (where a question like this belongs, anyway).

Hi Marc, first of all thank you for your contributions to the sharepoint community. [You’re welcome!]

I hope you can help me with this. I’ve been working in a sharepoint portal, it should work as a news site, right Now i’m using spservices to connect to sharepoint, it works great, except in the iPad. I know that there are some compstibility issues but I need to make it work.

Doing some tests I came to the conclusion that the only method in the lists.asmx service that it’s not working it’s GetListItems, do you have any information about this, or do you know of another way of getting the list ítems using jquery?

I would appreciate any information you could provide me.

Thank you very much.

It makes sense that one should be able to connect to SharePoint’s Web Services from *any* platform, whether iOS on the iPad or Linux or DR-DOS. The biggest trick is always going to be in the authentication.

The simplest approach is to set up the list where you want to use GetListItems for anonymous access. This will ensure that *anyone* can read the content. If anonymous access isn’t appropriate, then you’ll need to come up with a mechanism to authenticate your user the same way you would for any other access to SharePoint from an external – meaning non-Windows authentication – source.

Authentication is definitely *not* my arena, and I find that most of the research I do on the various methods and requirements get me into whirlpools of acronyms and jargon. When it comes to authentication methods, I’d prefer to ask the experts. A great place to ask questions about things like SharePoint authentication is SharePoint Overflow.

p.s. Come to think of it, I need to know a good answer to this, too, so *I* posted it to SharePoint Overflow! I’ll update this post if I get a definitive answer.