ios 8 : ABPeoplePickerNavigationController dismiss on implementing people picker delegate methods

Question

This is strange behavior noticed while accessing contact details from address book in ios 8. My scenario is simple

Show contacts table
select a row that will invoke didSelectPerson method
in didSelectPerson method

push SecondViewController

- (void)peoplePickerNavigationController:(ABPeoplePickerNavigationController*)peoplePicker didSelectPerson:(ABRecordRef)person;
{
    SecondViewController *detailVC = [[SecondViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"SecondViewController" bundle:nil];
    [detailVC.view setBackgroundColor: [UIColor redColor]];
    //    [peoplePicker.navigationController pushViewController:detailVC animated:YES];
    [peoplePicker pushViewController:detailVC animated:YES];
}

but what happens is ABPeoplePickerNavigationController dismiss. Please enlighten me on this.

Can't firgure it out either, and i'm having the exact same issue ^^ Empty method but, as soon as its called, the picker is dismissed. — Gil Sand, Dec 03 '14 at 14:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 08 '14 at 09:02

0

I don't know the philosophy thing what happens under the hood of the "didSelectPerson" method, me was facing the same problem today. I found a simple solution to overcome this issue, i override the "-(void)dismissViewControllerAnimated:(BOOL)flag completion:(void (^)(void))completion" method of the "ABPeoplePickerNavigationController". Then implement it like somewhat following

    bool dismissedEnabled;
   -(void)dismissViewControllerAnimated:(BOOL)flag completion:(void (^)(void))completion
   {
     if (dismissedEnabled) {
       [super dismissViewControllerAnimated:flag completion:completion];
     }
   }

then inside the "didSelectPerson" i have done the following

   viewController = [[ViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"ViewController" bundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]];

    dismissedEnabled = false;
    [self presentViewController:viewController animated:YES completion:nil];

this works for me, hope you guys overcome it too :)

answered Dec 08 '14 at 09:02

Ratul Sharker

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In order to do this, I subclass the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController and it worked fine for me. But Apple's doc stated that "The ABPeoplePickerNavigationController class does not support subclassing." Did Apple reject your app? – user523234 May 20 '15 at 15:30
Until now, not rejected yet due to subclassing the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController. If you get rejected or in doubt, you can override this method by using category feature described here https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/CustomizingExistingClasses/CustomizingExistingClasses.html – Ratul Sharker May 20 '15 at 16:38
We overlooked something quite simple: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30354402/the-abpeoplepickernavigationcontroller-class-does-not-support-subclassing – user523234 May 26 '15 at 23:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 08 '14 at 14:45

It automatically dismisses if you select a contact with a single email address for example. If a contact has more than one email, you must specify a predicate that will force the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController to push a ABPersonViewController on the stack.

if ([picker respondsToSelector:@selector(setPredicateForSelectionOfPerson:)])
    {
        // The people picker will select a person that has exactly one email address and call peoplePickerNavigationController:didSelectPerson:,
        // otherwise the people picker will present an ABPersonViewController for the user to pick one of the email addresses.
        picker.predicateForSelectionOfPerson = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"emailAddresses.@count = 1"];
    }

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 04 '15 at 08:12

I believe the default behavior in iOS 8 is that the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController is automatically dismissed when didSelectPerson is called.

The reason that the SecondViewController is not displayed (I'm inferring that this is the problem symptom) is because you are trying to push the SecondViewController while the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController is being dismissed. This overlapping animation is a problem that the iOS core view management/animation system tries to avoid.

You may get a warning in the console when this happens.

@Ratul's solution works because it circumvents this default behavior.

In my scenario, my code sleeps a second before presenting a UIAlertController from within didSelectPerson. This is a hack that depends on the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController dismissal animation taking less than a second. For me, if this alert is not displayed, nobody would even notice this was a problem.

If you want something more robust, you may want to override viewDidAppear to handle this special case (using a flag in your presenting view controller). But this gets a bit clumsy as well.

ios 8 : ABPeoplePickerNavigationController dismiss on implementing people picker delegate methods

3 Answers3