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objective-ciospush-notificationuilocalnotificationmfmailcomposeviewcontroller

iOS – How to deal with notifications when I have no "control" of the GUI

I'm using Apple's view controllers quite alot in my app (like MFMessageComposeViewController and ABPeoplePickerNavigationController). So when I receive a notification (Local or Remote notification) how would I deal with it the most elegant way since I can not interact (send messages) to Apple's view controllers.

My assumption is that if the user is actively using the app and in i.e MFMessageComposeViewController he does not want to get disturbed/interrupted with what he is doing. But if it was me I would get a bit confused if I was doing something and I would hear boing sound (from the notification) and then nothing more happened.

So would a reasonable way to handle this do let the user finish doing his task in whatever Apple view controller he is inside and then display the notification for the user?

Or dismiss the Apple view controller and handle the notifaction and then put the user back in the Apple view controller?

Solution

  • I'm not quite sure I understood you exactly correct, but to me it sound like you want to do something like this:

    • If the user is composing a message in your app and there is an incoming notification, lets say a push notification from the facebook app, you want to handle this event somehow in your app by letting your MFMessageComposerViewController do something.

    As answer to this request I would like to state the following:

    1. You should be able to send messages to your MFMessageComposerViewController if you extend this class (i.e. create a class called MyMessageComposerController and let it extend the standard controller, and do whatever you need there)

    2. However, you can't really do anything about the push notification, it comes from another app and this functionality is built into iOS, you can not make the push arrive later when the user is finished typing, it will always arrive and the user will always be the one to decide if he/she should keep typing or look at the notification. The only thing you can do is to make sure that your app saves everything that the user has typed so that he/she can continue typing when returning to your app.