I have been looking for a way to send a hyperlink of a URL with a different appearance to a mobile phone via SMS or MMS.
The only example of this that i can think of is the following:
[url=http://www.google.co.uk]Click Here[/url]
So the above code will show:
Click Here
when you click the 'Click Here' link it will open up http://www.google.co.uk.
Is there anyway that this can be replicated by using SMS or MMS?
As far as I know, there is not a generally accepted specification for rendering text messages with modern content. Though certain mobile operating systems (or rather messaging applications to be precise) might support inline links, it is not fail-proof and it won't work on every device.
Also, those smart-ish applications would not rely on a custom syntax but rather search for urls and make those clickable. That means it's not possible to set a custom text for a hyperlink in this context.
You can´t include hiperlinks in text messages, although most mobile browsers allow click in links. Also You could send a wap push (it´s a special binary sms) that it includes one link.
Related
Trying to share a calendar event over SMS. The text contains the datetime of the event, which iOS picks up as a link, which opens iCal (Create Event, Create Reminder, Show in Calendar, Copy Event).
When a user taps "Create Event" - it just creates an empty cal event for the datetime. Is there a way to auto-fill the event with details when the users taps "Create Event"? Perhaps through deeplinking a URL or similar?
The behaviour you describe is iphone ios doing some natural language processing and recognising that 'hey that looks like a date or time and location'. When you click on the text, it will offer to create the event but one still has to fill in the rest of the details. It is not yet clever enough to work out the Event subject, and may not be that good at it if it tried.
There is a term 'Rich Media Messaging'(RMM) which aims to get past the limitations of the basic sms (short message system). This is hard if one is looking for universal phone and phone provider support as not all phones do multi media messaging. RMM appears to basically be a combination of multi media messages and short links. So basically there is no 'markup' for simple text messaging.
The only reliable universally acceptable way to 'text' an event via sms, an event with full details that would be recognised by all smart phones is via a link to an ics file. As the standard SMS length is only 160 characters and most hyperlinks are pretty long (usually between 40 to 100 characters), they can eat up necessary space in your message. Unicode characters could use that up quicker, so a user friendly short link might be best.
The ics file has all the info to pass to the system:
the text/calendar mime type tells the system it's got events inside so pass the file to the calendar app
then the contents of the ics file inform the calendar app of all the bits of the event as per the RFC5545.
For demonstration, I texted the "5 May yoga" single event link from this page https://test.icalevents.com/agenda/ to a phone. That ics file only contains a single event.
When one clicks on the link in the text message, the smartphone does as described above and suggests to create an event. This method has the benefit that one could perhaps track the clicks to the short link.
My application (a DMS client) has strong ties to Microsoft technology, so my customers are on average much more likely to run Outlook for iOS than the default iOS Mail client.
However, Outlook does not respond to the MFMailComposeViewController, so that basically leaves two approaches on the table for sending email from the app:
Use the msoutlook:// URL scheme to open Outlook. This supports pre-populating recipients, subject, and a HTML styled body text, apparently without a maximum length. However, it does not seem to support attachments.
Use the UIActivityViewController (i.e. the "sharing" interface), which does allow for attachments (hurray!), but I don't know if it's possible to pre-populate any of the fields other than the content...and the sharing dialog itself is really unpleasant UI, interrupting the user flow with a complex choice.
Word (for iOS) presents the user with the following flow that directly opens a document as an attachment to a new email in Outlook. Assuming they don't use any private APIs, how are they doing that?
I am using twilio to send SMS messages to phone numbers. What I am having problems with is making sure that once a user gets the message the preview of what is at a certain link actually loads in the message the user sees on the phone.
What is the proper way to send a link that automatically shows the preview?
EDIT:
I tried the open graph api. Apple does have a tech note on that. But, then, why does this link provided a proper preview in messages when I send this link to another phone? It works, and it does not use open graph.
https://i1.wp.com/www.asphaltandrubber.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2018-Ducati-Panigale-V4-29.jpg?ssl=1
a couple of things you can try
have the link at start of the message or end of the message
the link should be properly formatted with either http:// or https://
iOS uses The Open Graph protocol to support what image to show in the link . http://ogp.me/
I don't want to write my own email app. All I want is to be able redirect to mail with a preconfigured search string to display relevant emails. There doesn't appear to be a way to read or list emails from mail.app from within another app. Am I overlooking something? Is there a workaround for this?
I am fully aware of and able to use message UI in my app. What I want is to read, not send, email that has already been downloaded and exists in mail.app.
The only way that you can use to connect apps with other apps in iOS is thought url scheme.
You can take a look at Url Scheme reference
but it seems like you can't make this action.
UPDATE:
you can take a look the extra functionalities at Wikipedia
do anybody know about how to read a SMS in iOS with Xamarin iOS ? and then I want to pass a string from that SMS to the application via link. For example when user click the link in the SMS it will pass a string value to the application and in the application a method is waiting to trigger that.
It's impossible to read incoming or storing SMS's due to iOS security restriction.
Although you can't directly intercept SMS messages, you can create a custom URL scheme so that if a user clicks a link in your message it will launch your app.
If Jason's answer of using a link to the app, there is an alternative. In my case a web service is sending down a code (two stage auth). When I know its going to be coming, I prompt the user to looks for it, and when it comes long press the message bubble, and copy the whole message to the pasteboard.
When the user switches back to my app, I've set a flag to look at the pasteboard, I see the message, extract out the code, and if it "works" the user can continue without further interruption.
Not as elegant as Jason's answer, but if you cannot control the sms content, its an option.
It is possible from iOS 12
textField.textContentType = .oneTimeCode
Please check this doc