What's the best way to allow users to load their history on iPhone?

Question

The title might be a little confusing but basically I am trying to design an iPhone app that will let users add records by hand to know what they did each workout. Due to the nature of this, people might want to add their previous records but it would take a lot of time for them to do this by hand, ie hundreds of records.

How can I allow them to create some sort of text that will store their history in a concise manner that I can then parse in the app? I mean I have never seen an app that allows picking files on iPhone. So not sure what the best practice on this device is.

I was also thinking of having the ability to type an url that will contain textual content like the ones provided by online text clipboard websites. I feel that would still take considerable amount of time as you will have to do this for each exercise.

I will most certainly have the ability to email a concise ascii file that will contain the entire history saved in the app in case they want to use it for whatever purpose.

The uncertain thing is how I could receive the same/similar file to use for loading the entire history.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can tell iOS that your app handles files of some type - say .xzd. When such a file is attached to an email, and the user taps on the attachment, the use is given a choice of all apps that say they process that kind of file.

You can use cvs files and have the user save the file with your custom extension.