Creating an Advanced Local Capacitor Plugin

Creating an Advanced Local Capacitor Plugin

In the introduction to Capacitor module, we already looked at the basic outline of how to build a custom native plugin to access native functionality. If there isn’t already an official Capacitor API or a community plugin to access what you want, sometimes you might need to build the native integration yourself.

However, the plugin we created was very simple. All we did was call a method to display a native alert. In this lesson, we are going to take a look at something a little more advanced that involves two way communication - we send some kind of data across the native bridge, and we receive some kind of data back.

Get the Nth Photo

What we are going to try to do in this lesson is to get the “n”th latest photo from the users gallery/photo library. If we supply 0 it should give us the latest photo, if we supply 1 it should give us the second to last photo the user has taken, and if we supply 20 it should give us the 21st last photo taken.

We are going to follow the same basic process as in the basic module, but we will be utilising some more advanced code.

Note

Remember to run ionic cap sync or npx cap sync before opening the native projects.

Note

We will only be implementing this plugin for iOS. Retrieving photos is more complex from Android as there is not a consistent place where photos are stored, so programatically retrieving the “5th latest photo” is difficult.

Adding Native Code for iOS

First, you will need to open Xcode:

npx cap open ios

or

ionic cap open ios

Within XCode, you will need to expand App on the left, and then select the App target within that:

You can then right click it to create a new file - you should choose a Swift file and name it something like NthPhotoPlugin.swift. You could then add the following code to the file:

import Capacitor
import Photos

@objc(NthPhotoPlugin)
public class NthPhotoPlugin: CAPPlugin, CAPBridgedPlugin {

    public let identifier = "NthPhotoPlugin"
    public let jsName = "NthPhotoPlugin"
    public let pluginMethods: [CAPPluginMethod] = [
        CAPPluginMethod(name: "getNthPhoto", returnType: CAPPluginReturnPromise)
    ]

    @objc func getNthPhoto(_ call: CAPPluginCall) {
        let photoAt = Int(call.getString("photoAt") ?? "0") ?? 0
        let photos = PHPhotoLibrary.authorizationStatus()
        if photos == .notDetermined {
            PHPhotoLibrary.requestAuthorization({status in
                if status == .authorized{
                    let base64String = self.getPhoto(photoAt: photoAt);
                    call.resolve([
                        "image": base64String
                    ])
                } else {
                    call.reject("Not authorised to access Photos")
                }
            })
        } else if photos == .authorized {
            let base64String = self.getPhoto(photoAt: photoAt);
            call.resolve([
                "image": base64String
            ])
        } else {
            call.reject("Something went wrong");
        }

    }

    func getPhoto(photoAt: Int) -> String {
        let fetchOptions = PHFetchOptions()
        fetchOptions.sortDescriptors = [NSSortDescriptor(key: "creationDate", ascending: false)]
        fetchOptions.fetchLimit = 100
        let fetchResult = PHAsset.fetchAssets(with: .image, options: fetchOptions)
        let image = self.getAssetThumbnail(asset: fetchResult.object(at: photoAt))
        let imageData:Data =  image.pngData()!
        return imageData.base64EncodedString()
    }

    func getAssetThumbnail(asset: PHAsset) -> UIImage {
        let manager = PHImageManager.default()
        let option = PHImageRequestOptions()
        var thumbnail = UIImage()
        option.isSynchronous = true
        manager.requestImage(for: asset, targetSize: CGSize(width: 500, height: 500), contentMode: .aspectFit, options: option, resultHandler: {(result, info)->Void in
            thumbnail = result!
        })
        return thumbnail
    }
}

If you’re like me and don’t really know how to code in Swift/Java then this probably looks like a lot! The truth is that I was able to piece this together through some Google searches, as it is pretty easy to find code samples for common operations. Now, of course, we can also lean into AI for help as well.