iPhone POST request with JSON data - objective-c

Question

I am building my first iPhone application and have run into problems trying to POST json data to my MongoDB database.
This is my code thus far:
NSString *post = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"{\"name\":\"blah\"&\"reputation\":\"100\"&\"phone_number\":\"1234\"}"];
NSData *postData = [post dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES];
NSString *postLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%d", [postData length]];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init];
[request setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://myURL/users"]];
[request setHTTPMethod:#"POST"];
[request setValue:postLength forHTTPHeaderField:#"Content-Length"];
//[request setValue:#"application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Content-Type"];
[request setValue:#"application/json" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Content-Type"];
[request setValue:#"application/json" forHTTPHeaderField:#"Accept"];
[request setHTTPBody:postData];
NSURLResponse *response;
NSData *POSTReply = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:nil];
NSString *theReply = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[POSTReply bytes] length:[POSTReply length] encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];
NSLog(#"Reply: %#", theReply);
I get this response in the console:
2014-06-10 16:07:09.758 SocialEyez[2226:70b] Reply: {
"_id": "5397656dd7ec395c1b808230"
}
So even though the POST seems to go through fine, there is something wrong with my formatting which prevents the JSON data from being entered.
I've tried to format the NSString a hundred different ways but nothing seems to work.
Please help me out!!
EDIT:
When I send this request over jQuery:
jQuery.post("http://site/users", { "name": "George Washington", "reputation": "pres", "phone_number": "1234" }, function (data, textStatus, jqXHR) { console.log("Post resposne:"); console.dir(data); console.log(textStatus); console.dir(jqXHR); });
I get the following response:
_id: "53978f4cd7ec395c1b808247"
name: "George Washington"
reputation: "pres"
phone_number: "1234"

Answer 1

This example assumes that the post data should be JSON.
Create the JSON from a dictionary, let NSJSONSerialization add the JSON syntax.
// #"{\"name\":\"blah\"&\"reputation\":\"100\"&\"phone_number\":\"1234\"}"
// Create the dictionary
NSDictionary *postDict = #{#"name":#"blah", #"reputation":#"100", #"phone_number":#"1234"};
// Create the JSON data
NSError *error;
NSData *jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:postDict options:0 error:&error];
// Just for this example: display the jsonData as an ASCII string
NSLog(#"jsonData as String: %#", [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);
NSLog output:
jsonData: <7b226e61 6d65223a 22626c61 68222c22 72657075 74617469 6f6e223a 22313030 222c2270 686f6e65 5f6e756d 62657222 3a223132 3334227d>
jsonData as String: {"name":"blah","reputation":"100","phone_number":"1234"}