ios - UIAlertView And UIAlertController

Question

I am using SWIFT in xcode 6 to develope my application AND needs to support the APP for iphone 4 and later versions... So have selected the 'Deploment Target' as 7.1. In simple words needs to support iOS7, iOS8 AND iOS9...

When using Alert View I came across in many places discussing now we have to use newly introduced 'UIAlertController' rather than the old 'UIAlertView'...

By reading got to know UIAlertView is deprecated from ios 8.

But in my case as I have to support for ios 7.1 AND I can NOT only use 'UIAlertController'.

I started using as the following way as many tutorials explains...

if (objc_getClass("UIAlertController") != nil)
{
    // Use UIAlertController
}
else
{
    // Use UIAlertView
}

But in this way got to write the same code twice and really annoyiong... Either I have to create a custom Alertview combining both or needs to continue coding like this....

but just to test I've used only UIAlertView (ignoring UIAlertController) and the app runs fine even in ios 8 simulators... But the document says UIAlertView is deprecated from iOS 8.0...

So my question is, Like to hear what the best practice to continue my app with these API changes... Is it alright if I ignore 'UIAlertController' and work with old 'UIAlertView' until stop support for iOS7 one day... Will that effect in to my app in any way bad? Thanks

Answer 1

I've written a wrapper around these two classes which uses appropriate classes according to iOS version.

find it here

https://github.com/amosavian/ExtDownloader/blob/master/Utility%2BUI.swift

to show a simple alert use this:

 Utility.UI.alertShow("message", withTitle: "title", viewController: self);

to show an action view: use this code:

let buttons = [Utility.UI.ActionButton(title: "Say Hello", buttonType: .Default, buttonHandler: { () -> Void in
        print("Hello")
    })]
Utility.UI.askAction("message", withTitle: "title", viewController: self, anchor: Utility.UI.AnchorView.BarButtonItem(button: uibarbuttontapped), buttons: buttons)

In case you are presenting action in iPhone, it will add a cancel button automatically. But you can have custom cancel button by defining a button with type of ".Cancel"

If you want show a modal alert view, use this code:

let cancelBtn = Utility.UI.AlertButton(title: "Cancel", buttonType: .Cancel, buttonHandler: nil)
let okBtn = Utility.UI.AlertButton(title: "OK", buttonType: .Default, buttonHandler: { (textInputs) -> Void in
            print("OK button pressed")
})
Utility.UI.askAlert("message", withTitle: "title", viewController: self, buttons: [cancelBtn, okBtn], textFields: nil)

As you can see, the text fields is set to nil above. You can set it if you want ask something from user, like this:

let cancelBtn = Utility.UI.AlertButton(title: "Cancel", buttonType: .Cancel, buttonHandler: nil)
let okBtn = Utility.UI.AlertButton(title: "OK", buttonType: .Default, buttonHandler: { (textInputs) -> Void in
        print("You entered" + textInputs[0])
    }
})
let textFields = [Utility.UI.AlertTextField(placeHolder: "enter secret text here", defaultValue: "", textInputTraits: TextInputTraits.secretInput())]
Utility.UI.askAlert("Enter password", withTitle: "title", viewController: self, buttons: [cancelBtn, okBtn], textFields: textFields)

You can customize almost everything. e.g by defining custom textInputTrait you can customize text inputs easily. also you have not to deal with delegates, instead simple closures are there. Please read code to find out more.