iOS Today App Extension Widget Tap To Open Containing App

Hello,

Recently I added Today App Extension to one of my iOS app. In that we have a requirement to open containing app when user taps anywhere in app extension view. In this blog I am going to explain how to do this. First you have to add tap gesture recognizer to your main container view. In my case I had UIView as base container view. Inside this view I have added all other views.

So first create iboutlet property for that view. Now create Single Tap Gesture Recognizer.

UITapGestureRecognizer *singleFingerTap =

    [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self

                                            action:@selector(handleSingleTap:)];

[mainContainerView addGestureRecognizer:singleFingerTap];

As seen in above code, first we created singleFingerTap recognizer and added this as gesture recognizer to mainContainerView. Now add following function which we mentioned in selector.

- (void)handleSingleTap:(UITapGestureRecognizer *)recognizer {

    NSURL *pjURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"AppUrlType://home"];

    [self.extensionContext openURL:pjURL completionHandler:nil];

}

That's it. Simple.. isn't it? But wait, it won't work as we have to add URL type in our app. In iOS you can define custom URL schemes and URL types for your app. Using which you can open your app from browser or from some other app using openURL function as shown above in code. So let's add custom URL type for your app.

Open plist file of your main app and add new item with name URL types, expand item 0 of it and add new item with name URL Schemes. Expand item 0 of URL Schemes and add  "

AppUrlType" as a value. For your application, you can use any valid name. After adding this, you should have following structure in your plist file.

That's it. Now select your App Extension Target and run the widget. Tap anywhere in your widget and it will open your containing app.