Runtime xml/json generation of directory content - objective-c

Question

For an ios app I try to develop, I need to get a listing of the content of an online directory. (My app works with local directories but I'm trying to edit it so it works with an online directory)
I've been looking into this a lot but I can't manage to find the best solution to do this. (I learned you can't read the contents of an online directory and subdirectories with objective-c and print them to an array to display them in, for example, a tableview).
I did learn how to create a connection and output the html of a certain page (or an xml file). That's why I was wondering... Is there a way (webservice?) to generate an xml/JSON/html file that prints the content of a directory (if possible also subdirectories)? The generation of this xml/JSON/html has to be done at runtime, the moment my app asks for the file, since people will be able to add files (pdf's, video's,...) to the directory via FTP. (editing the xml/JSON file everytime is not an option).
Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

You could create a simple webservice in many ways. For example, with PHP you could write something like this:
<?php
$dir = '/myDir';
$files = scandir($dir);
echo json_encode($files);
?>
Then just point your app to get the contents of that page and parse the JSON.
scandir: http://php.net/manual/en/function.scandir.php
json_encode: http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php