Problems with structs in Swift and making a UIImage from url? - ios

Question

Alright, I am not familiar with structs or the ordeal I am dealing with in Swift, but what I need to do is create an iMessage in my iMessage app extension with a sticker in it, meaning the image part of the iMessage is set to the sticker.
I have pored over Apple's docs and https://www.captechconsulting.com/blogs/ios-10-imessages-sdk-creating-an-imessages-extension but I do not understand how to do this or really how structs work. I read up on structs but that has not helped me accomplishing what Apple does in their sample code (downloadable at Apple)
What Apple does is they first compose a message, which I understood, taking their struct as a property, but I take sticker instead
guard let conversation = activeConversation else { fatalError("Expected a conversation") }
//Create a new message with the same session as any currently selected message.
let message = composeMessage(with: MSSticker, caption: "sup", session: conversation.selectedMessage?.session)
// Add the message to the conversation.
conversation.insert(message) { error in
if let error = error {
print(error)
}
}
They then do this (this is directly from sample code) to compose the message:
fileprivate func composeMessage(with iceCream: IceCream, caption: String, session: MSSession? = nil) -> MSMessage {
var components = URLComponents()
components.queryItems = iceCream.queryItems
let layout = MSMessageTemplateLayout()
layout.image = iceCream.renderSticker(opaque: true)
layout.caption = caption
let message = MSMessage(session: session ?? MSSession())
message.url = components.url!
message.layout = layout
return message
}
}
Basically this line is what Im having the problem with as I need to set my sticker as the image:
layout.image = iceCream.renderSticker(opaque: true)
Apple does a whole complicated function thing that I don't understand in renderSticker to pull the image part out of their stickers, and I have tried their way but I think this is better:
let img = UIImage(contentsOfURL: square.imageFileURL)
layout.image = ing
layout.image needs a UIImage, and I can get the imageFileURL from the sticker, I just cant get this into a UIImage. I get an error it does not match available overloads.
What can I do here? How can I insert the image from my sticker into a message? How can I get an image from its imageFileURL?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what exactly the question is, but I'll try to address as much as I can --
As rmaddy mentioned, if you want to create an image given a file location, simply use the UIImage constructor he specified.
As far as sending just a sticker (which you asked about in the comments on rmaddy's answer), you can insert just a sticker into an iMessage conversation. This functionality is available as part of an MSConversation. Here is a link to the documentation:
https://developer.apple.com/reference/messages/msconversation/1648187-insert
The active conversation can be accessed from your MSMessagesAppViewController.

Answer 2

There is no init(contentsOfURL:) initializer for UIImage. The closest one is init(contentsOfFile:).
To use that one with your file URL you can do:
let img = UIImage(contentsOfFile: square.imageFileURL.path)