Getting the user's permission to send them local notifications in iOS (using Swift)

Ok for iOS devices I think it will still be at least another year, till we have devices that are using versions earlier than iOS 8! so what does that mean?

Problem

Well, it means that if we are building an iOS app that works on both iOS 7 and 8 which uses a feature introduced in iOS 8, we need to check if that feature exists on the device before using it. Now the iOS app that I am building uses local notifications and in iOS 8 Apple introduced this feature to ask the user to receive LOCAL NOTIFICATIONS via  registerUserNotificationSettings. So what I wanted to do is check if the feature exists on the device the app is running on without checking the iOS version on the device via UIDevice.currentDevice().systemVersion.

Solution

So turns out NSObject has this really useful method called instancesRespondToSelector, so I can solve my problem of finding out the presence of registerUserNotificationsSettings using the following code,

UIApplication.instancesRespondToSelector(Selector("registerUserNotificationSettings:")

Summary

Ok so let me summarise this entire post. So here goes,

What am I trying to do? (permission to send local notifications)

My iOS app uses local notifications and the app is designed to run on devices running both iOS 7 and iOS 8. Now if the app is being run on an iOS 8 device, I want the app to get the user's permission whether or not the app is allowed to send them local notifications.

Solution

In this method of the AppDelegate 
func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject : AnyObject]?) -> Bool
I first find out if OS of the device app is running on, supports the method to get user's permission to send them local notifications
if(UIApplication.instancesRespondToSelector(Selector("registerUserNotificationSettings:"))) {
}
If it does then the app gets the user's permission to send them local notifications, so the entire block of code to achieve the above looks like this
func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
    // Override point for customization after application launch.
    if(UIApplication.instancesRespondToSelector(Selector("registerUserNotificationSettings:"))) {
        UIApplication.sharedApplication().registerUserNotificationSettings(UIUserNotificationSettings(forTypes: .Alert | .Badge | .Sound, categories: nil))
    }
    return true
}

Links with useful info?

This great tutorial by IOSCreator  i.e. Local Notification Tutorial in IOS8 with Swift.

If there is something that is not very clear about this post, then please leave a comment with a question about what you need clarified.

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