Button/Link inside UILabel to switch to another ViewController - ios

Question

I want to show some Facebook posts inside my iOS app. I get the whole post as a JSON-object from the Graph API. Works pretty fine.
So, if a user makes a new post and tags any page inside this post, the user-id (or page-id) is also included in that JSON object, giving me the offset and length inside the text, which should link to that page. (Sounds weird, so let me give you an example):
{
"id": "135416986571191_709831435796407",
"from": {
"category": "Musician/band",
"name": "DANNIC",
"id": "135416986571191"
},
"to": {
"data": [
{
"category": "Musician/band",
"name": "Tom & Jame",
"id": "423531801036780"
},
{
"category": "Record label",
"name": "Revealed Recordings",
"id": "104563552952573"
}
]
},
"message": "Wait For You (Tom & Jame Remix) is coming out in 2 days on Revealed Recordings!",
"message_tags": {
"14": [
{
"id": "423531801036780",
"name": "Tom & Jame",
"type": "page",
"offset": 14,
"length": 10
}
],
"59": [
{
"id": "104563552952573",
"name": "Revealed Recordings",
"type": "page",
"offset": 59,
"length": 19
}
]
},
"picture": "https://fbcdn-vthumb-a.akamaihd.net/hvthumb-ak-xfa1/v/t15.0-10/10876067_709831642463053_709831435796407_64260_924_b.jpg?oh=49c825ff152d98de125820093b5cff05&oe=5551397E&__gda__=1431085295_7c41923cf64cc0946a39e85b705ee691",
....
....
As you can see, there is the "message_tags", which contains two page-ids, the name and offset and length. I want to replace the text in the "message" with a UIButton or just a link to that page. How can I do that?
Here is a screenshot of that post how it looks inside the Facebook App:
As you can see, the "Tom & Jame" is clickable and the rest (except "Revealed Recordings") is normal text. If you tap on 'Tom & Jame' it will switch to another View Controller showing the page of them. That's exactly what I want inside my app.
I know I could use an NSAttributedText for my label, and use the NSLinkAttributedName to make the text clickable. But I don't want my app to switch to safari and open the facebook page, I want to stay inside my app and just switch to another UIViewController, showing the infos of that page etc.
Can I use my app's url scheme for that link, even though I stay inside my app? Or can I put a UIButton inside that label and handle the tap inside my view controller?
Whats the best solution for that? Any help is appreciated! :)

Answer 1

What I would do is put the text in a UITextView and use NSAttributedText. I would construct the URLs in a manner that I could parse later (just enough to get UITextView to render a link, but it doesn't have to be a real URL on facebook).
Then I would override shouldInteractWithURL which is sent to the delegate of UITextView. Here, I could re-parse the URL, retrieve the data, and load my subsequent view controller.
Take a look at the reference here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UITextViewDelegate_Protocol/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/intfm/UITextViewDelegate/textView:shouldInteractWithURL:inRange: