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iOS Dropbox Application - My application not appearing in dropbox "share with" options.

Hello,

This is my first post in this forum so please pardon me if its posted in an incorrect category/topic. Below is my question.

We are developing a "share extension" on iOS for our mobile application (lets say it shareApp) which allows user to share photos/urls/pdf files from other applications like Photos, Safari or any other application which has external sharing option into our application.
We see that dropbox also allows exporting/sharing links of the files stored in drop box to other applications using the "share sheet".
When i open a PDF or an image file, I see share option and once I click on it, it opens up the default iOS share screen from where the user can share the file using "airdrop" or with any third party app like "Message", "Mail", "Twitter", "Facebook" etc.
My problem here is that our application "shareApp" does not appear in the list of available applications. I see applications like "Buffer", "Linkedin", "Viber" etc being shown in the list but our application does not show up here.
My application supports sharing of images/links/pdfs and it works perfectly fine when used with Photos/Safari.

Can someone guide me on how to show my application in the list of "Share with" options for a file from dropbox.

Regards,

Bhavik

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Comments

Rich

Does this help?

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1587/_index.html

Bhavik B.

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the quick reply. Adding support for this would mean that my application behaves as an "viewer" or "editor" for the file. This is similar to "Open In" behavior on iOS based devices. But we dont want to support that. What we are trying to achieve here is sharing the file or link (to the file) using the new "Share Extension" functionality added in iOS 8. To explain it better, take a look at below example:

Go to Photos on any iOS device running iOS 8 and above.
Select a photo and select the share icon (a box with an arrow pointing upwards).
This will open a share sheet from where the user can decide on how they want to share the file.
You will see a list of applications that appear here depending upon the applications that you have installed. But in most cases you will see "Messages", "Mail", "Facebook" and "Twitter". In this list a third party application can also appear if it supports share extension (which my application does).

I was under impression that the latest Dropbox application supports sharing using above behavior. But it seems that dropbox application still supports sharing using the old behavior of document types.

Regards,

Bhavik

Greg-DB

This topic is generally meant for the Dropbox API, so as this question isn't related to Dropbox API, it might not be the best place for help with this, which is more about iOS APIs.

That said, I believe the Dropbox for iOS app does support both the old "Open In" behavior, as well as the newer iOS 8 share extensions. For example, just setting up (and not otherwise editing) a share extension using the share extension template in Xcode in a new project makes that app's extension show in the Dropbox app for me:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ruqpjsiga1e78ou/Screenshot%202015-01-23%2014.32.50.png?dl=0

Likewise, I do see other share extensions from other third party apps in that share panel in the Dropbox app on an actual device. Unfortunately, this is outside my area of expertise but hopefully that will help get you started.

Bhavik B.

Hi Greg,

Thanks for a quick confirmation that a vanilla extension shows up in dropbox application. This helped a lot in debugging the problem. The correct thing here is that my extension had to support "text" along with "url" and "image" for it to show up in dropbox application.

Apologies for posting it under incorrect topic as i mentioned earlier that this is my first post on this forum and i was not sure where to post this question.

Thanks once again.

Regards,

Bhavik