Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upload to AWS S3 from Java API

In this post, you will see code samples for how to upload a file to AWS S3 bucket from a Java Spring Boot app. The code you will see here is from one of my open-source repositories on Github, called document-sharing. Problem Let’s say you are building a document sharing app where you allow your users to upload the file to a public cloud solution. Now, let’s say you are building the API for your app with Spring Boot and you are using AWS S3 as your public cloud solution. How would you do that? This blog post contains the code that can help you achieve that. Read more below,  Upload to AWS S3 bucket from Java Spring Boot app - My Day To-Do (mydaytodo.com)
Post a Comment
Read more

App update, discovering Protractor(testing) and an Angularjs State machine

So for the last couple of weeks, I have not be able to update my blog or finish a couple of the posts that I started writing. Well, I have...been a bit busy, with some the following things,  Testing my app I have been using the app( iOS ) on my iPhone for the past couple of months now, which is both good and bad. The good thing is I can test it and the bad thing is, I can use it every day. Part of the reason, I started building this app is to have something that I can and like to use everyday and since I am already using it, the incentive to release it is not as high as if it were something that I could not use. Anyway I did make some good progress over the last couple of weeks, like  Delete the app from my iPhone and do a clean install: this did help me find a few simple bugs that would pop-up when the app is first installed GET AN APP ICON, FINALLY! this was a bit of a hurdle and I thanks to Fiverr  and fivercrazyguy , I finally have my app icon. The day job ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why can't I cancel a local notification in my iOS app?(in Swift)

Prelude I have mentioned the fact that I am working on my first iOS app in a number of my previous posts and as such I face a number of newbie/noob(?) problems. They are not really problems as much as they are simply things that I do not know, for e.g. the following, how do I get the day of the week? where is my string.replaceAll in Swift? knowing which local notification brought my app to foreground ? serving HTML content in an iOS app that works on iOS 7 and above Thankfully, I have managed to make at least one generic solution and contribute it to the community i.e. my open-source Xcode project template( HTML5StarterAppWithSwift ) which you can get from Github . So this post basically describes another very simple problem that I have found a solution to, but I do not fully understand why the problem was occurring in the first place. Introduction As I have mentioned in this post , my iOS app uses local notifications i.e. UILocalNotification   and i...
Post a Comment
Read more