Enable phone number recognition in Feature PopupView

[mmoosbac94]

Our client requires the ability to add phone numbers as an attribute in the features popup view. These phone numbers should be recognized as clickable links, enabling users to initiate calls directly. Would it be possible to implement it? Or am I missing something?

For web links its working fine, but in the popup, they appear as 'View' elements to tap. Why is that?

[mhdostal]

Unfortunately, SwiftUI does not currently support recognizing phone numbers as clickable links. In UIKit, there was dataDetectorTypes which handled that for you. A quick web search does provide some examples of how to wrap UIKit components, using UIViewRepresentable to get similar behavior, but it's not something we support in the Toolkit at this time.

I'm Ok leaving this issue open in the hopes that we (or someone from the community) can implement this for Popups (and Forms). We an also hope that Apple implements support for it in the next version of SwiftUI.

[mansibarodia10057]

@mmoosbac94 - Does the code shared below work in your case? It doesn't validate the phone number's format, but converts it into tappable link and if the link is valid, then opens the Phone app when it's tapped. "featureAttributePhoneNumber" is the stored phone number of type String.

private func processNumber(phoneNumberString: String) -> URL? {
    var phoneNumber = phoneNumerString
    
    if let num = Double(phoneNumberString) {
        phoneNumber = String(format: "%.0f", num)
    }
    
    return URL.init(string: "tel:\(phoneNumber)")
}

/// Note: Add this to your view outside of the view's body.
@Environment(\.openURL) var openURL

/// Add this within view's body
VStack {
    let url = processNumber(phoneNumberString: featureAttributePhoneNumber)
    
    Text(featureAttributePhoneNumber).font(.body).foregroundColor(url == nil ? .primary : Color.blue).padding(.bottom, 2.0)
        .fixedSize(horizontal: false, vertical: true)
        .contentShape(Rectangle()).textSelection(.enabled)
        .onTapGesture {
            if let url = url {
                openURL(url)
            }
        }
}

[mhdostal]

For web links its working fine, but in the popup, they appear as 'View' elements to tap. Why is that?

"View" is used simply as a placeholder, instead of displaying the full URL, which is probably not that helpful. The code for displaying the "View" button is here

[yo1995]

To add to Mansi's comment

• If the field is phone number-only, then try to parse it and open via a tel: link would work, such as

  Link("(123) 456-7890", destination: URL(string: "tel:1234567890")!)

• If the field is a mixed description with various detectable information, we can probably enhance our current implementation (that only detects https links) with NSDataDetector that allows various checking types, e.g., phone number, link, date, address, etc.

Let us know which case suits you better!

[mmoosbac94]

Thanks for all the feedback! I thought there was no way to access the fields of the PopupView manually for parsing and opening via tel:, or am I missing something? But generally, we would really appreciate it if you could enhance the type detection, especially for phone numbers. Thank you very much.

[mhdostal]

I thought there was no way to access the fields of the PopupView manually for parsing and opening via tel:, or am I missing something?

No, you are not missing anything. The suggestions above could be used if you wanted to modify the Toolkit code to support phone numbers.