iOS 8 SDK: modal UIWebView and camera/image picker

Question

I have found that, when compiling for iOS 8 (and running in iOS 8), a UIWebView cannot show the camera/image picker if the UIWebView is in a view controller presented modally. It works without problem in view controllers directly “hanging” from the window rootViewController or view controllers pushed from it.

The test application can be found at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6214425/TestModalWebCamera.zip but I will describe it below.

My test application (built with storyboards, but the real application doesn’t use them) has two view controllers (unoriginally named ViewController and ViewController2). ViewController is contained in a UINavigationController which is the root view controller. ViewController contains a UIWebView (works OK), a button that “shows” (“pushes”) ViewController2, and a UIBarButtonItem which modally presents ViewController2. ViewController2 has another UIWebView which works when “pushed” but not when “presented”.

Both ViewController and ViewController2 are loaded with:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
  [super viewDidLoad];

  [self.webView loadHTMLString:@"<input type=\"file\" accept=\"image/*;capture=camera\">" baseURL:nil];
}

When trying to use the modal UIWebView Xcode prints the following in the console and dismisses the app modal:

Warning: Attempt to present <UIImagePickerController: 0x150ab800> on <ViewController2: 0x14623580> whose view is not in the window hierarchy!

My current theory is that the changes in UIActionSheet to UIAlertController might have produced this situation, but it’s quite hard to prove. I will open a Radar with Apple, just in case.

Has someone found the same situation and some workaround?

Answer 1

I found that in iOS 8.0.2 iPad does not seem to have that bug but iPhone still does.

However, overriding following in the view controller containing the uiwebview

-(void)dismissViewControllerAnimated:(BOOL)flag completion:(void (^)(void))completion

And checking that there is a presentedViewController seems to work.

But need to check side effects

#import "UiWebViewVC.h"

@interface UiWebViewVC ()

@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIWebView *uiwebview;

@end

@implementation UiWebViewVC

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://html5demos.com/file-api-simple"];

    NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];

    self.uiwebview.scalesPageToFit = YES;

    [self.uiwebview loadRequest:request];
}


-(void)dismissViewControllerAnimated:(BOOL)flag completion:(void (^)(void))completion
{
    if ( self.presentedViewController)
    {
        [super dismissViewControllerAnimated:flag completion:completion];
    }
}


@end