ios 11 imessage extension message.url does not open safari - ios

Question

I'm adding an iMessage extension target to my app. The extension is supposed to send a message that has a url attribute. The behaviour I'm expecting when a user touches the message is to open the browser using the url attribute of the message.
I have a button in my messageView which executes this code:
#IBAction func labelButton(_ sender: Any) {
let layout = MSMessageTemplateLayout()
layout.imageTitle = "iMessage Extension"
layout.caption = "Hello world!"
layout.subcaption = "Test sub"
guard let url: URL = URL(string: "https://google.com") else { return }
let message = MSMessage()
message.layout = layout
message.summaryText = "Sent Hello World message"
message.url = url
activeConversation?.insert(message, completionHandler: nil)
}
If I touch the message, it expands the MessageViewController
I have then added this:
override func didSelect(_ message: MSMessage, conversation: MSConversation) {
if let message = conversation.selectedMessage {
// message selected
// Eg. open your app:
self.extensionContext?.open(message.url!, completionHandler: nil)
}
}
And now, when I touch the message, it opens my main app but still not my browser.
I have seen on another post (where I cannot comment, thus I opened this post) that it is impossible to open in Safari but I have a news app which inserts links to articles and allows with a click on the message to open the article in a browser window, while the app is installed.
So, can someone please tell how I can proceed to force opening the link in a browser window?
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Here is a trick to insert a link in a message. It does not allow to create an object that has an url attribute but just to insert a link directly which will open in the default web browser.
activeConversation?.insertText("https://google.com", completionHandler: nil)

Answer 2

I have published a sample on github showing how to launch a URL from inside an iMessage extension. It just uses a fixed URL but the launching code is what you need.
Copying from my readme
The obvious thing to try is self.extensionContext.open which is documented as Asks the system to open a URL on behalf of the currently running app extension.
That doesn't work. However, you can iterate back up the responder chain to find a suitable handler for the open method (actually the iMessage instance) and invoke open with that object.
This approach works for URLs which will open a local app, like settings for a camera, or for web URLs.
The main code
#IBAction public func onOpenWeb(_ sender: UIButton) {
guard let url = testUrl else {return}
// technique that works rather than self.extensionContext.open
var responder = self as UIResponder?
let handler = { (success:Bool) -> () in
if success {
os_log("Finished opening URL")
} else {
os_log("Failed to open URL")
}
}
let openSel = #selector(UIApplication.open(_:options:completionHandler:))
while (responder != nil){
if responder?.responds(to: openSel ) == true{
// cannot package up multiple args to openSel so we explicitly call it on the iMessage application instance
// found by iterating up the chain
(responder as? UIApplication)?.open(url, completionHandler:handler) // perform(openSel, with: url)
return
}
responder = responder!.next
}
}