iOS 9

[irace]

iOS 9

[mbbischoff]

How can we resolve this? It seems as though modifying the extension-facing API to support both types of input is the most future-proof course of action

I haven’t watched the session yet, but I did read your notes on it. This seems like an appropriate, if slightly inelegant way to go. I like a lot better than either of these...

• Go iOS 9 only and not be useful to anyone who needs to support iOS 8 for a while still (bad option, almost no one will use this)
• Forget about changing the library in the future to better mesh with how activity items work in a post-iOS 9 world (makes this library very useful in the short term but more annoying to use than it needs to be post-iOS 9)

[irace]

I actually dreamt about this last night. How sad is that?

I think on the extension side, we’d want our custom class to wrap the extension context rather than an individual item. We would no longer be providing a cleaner API on top of NSExtensionItem on the extension side, but we’d be able to provide a uniform API – an array of NSExtensionItem instances and some metadata – regardless of if the input was structured the old way (one XExtensionItemSource) or the new way (a bunch of raw input items plus one XExtensionItemSource.

The new class would look something like this:

@interface XExtensionItemContext : NSObject

/**
 @see `NSExtensionContext`
 */
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSArray/*<NSExtensionItem>*/ *inputItems;

/**
 @see `XExtensionItemSource`
 */
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSArray/*<NSString>*/ *tags;

/**
 @see `XExtensionItemSource`
 */
@property (nonatomic, readonly) XExtensionItemReferrer *referrer;

/**
 @see `XExtensionItemSource`
 */
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSDictionary *userInfo;

/**
 Inialize a new instance with an incoming `NSExtensionContext`.

 @param extensionItemContext Extension context.

 @return New instance populated with the extension context.
 */
- (instancetype)initWithExtensionContext:(NSExtensionContext *)extensionContext NS_DESIGNATED_INITIALIZER;

@end

Title and attributed content text would no longer be something that XExtensionItem concerns itself with, since it would now be augmenting one or more NSExtensionItem instances, rather than expecting to be used in place of them. In short, I think this makes the API slightly less nice in the short term but much more future-proof.

I have an in-progress branch that makes these changes that I’ll happily link to from this issue once I’ve got it a little further along. In the meantime, feedback welcome!