通过iOS 8小部件断开蓝牙设备

Question

I am developing a Bluetooth Low Energy (4.0) device that works with an iOS app and uses CoreBluetooth. I have successfully created this app and it interacts with the device just fine. However, now that iOS 8 allows developers to implement custom widgets, I want to display a "Disconnect" button in the UINotification "Today" Center.

The issue is this: I believe I have read that there is no way to communicate between the widget and the app meaning that the widget has it's own container. This also means then that I cannot access the Bluetooth object in the app that is holding the reference to my Bluetooth device from the widget itself in order to disconnect the object. I am able to create a new Bluetooth object inside the widget class and retrieve the bluetooth connection from the iOS system but even I disconnected the BT device at this point, it would still be holding a reference inside the app.

Can anyone offer any insight on wonder what I am trying to do is possible?

Answer 1

You could possibly use a shared NSUserDefaults database to transfer data between your app and extension. You may also be interested in NSUserDefaults key value observing .

App extensions are meant to be independent from their containing app, and I'm not sure they were meant for this purpose.

However, another option would be to implement a custom URL scheme for your containing app, and then to use openURL to open your containing app and execute a disconnect action (or anything else you'd like your extension to do).