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iosswiftmapkitcompass

How to show MapKit compass?

Currently the compass only get's shown if a User applies a rotate-gesture. Otherwise the compass is hidden.

img1

But it would be nice if my two wishes below were fulfilled!

  • Is it possible to display the compass always?
  • How to show / hide the compass-view using Swift?
Solution

  • You can do this quite easily in iOS 11 by using the new MKCompassButton class.

    You need to create an instance of MKCompassButton and add it to your map view. You can then set its compassVisibility property to one of:

    • .visible - always visible
    • .never - never visible
    • .adaptive - the compasss is only visible if the map is rotated away from a North/up orientation.

    If you keep a reference to the compass in a property you can change its visibility as you need:

    mapview.showsCompass = false  // Hide built-in compass

compassButton = MKCompassButton(mapView: mapview)   // Make a new compass
compassButton.compassVisibility = .visible          // Make it visible

mapview.addSubview(compassButton) // Add it to the view

// Position it as required

compassButton.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
compassButton.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: mapview.trailingAnchor, constant: -12).isActive = true
compassButton.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: mapview.topAnchor, constant: 12).isActive = true

    Unfortunately, for prior versions of iOS there is no simple solution. I have seen suggestions that involve looking through the map view's subviews to try and find the compass view but there seems to be mixed results.