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Dial a Phone Number – So Many Options
I am aware of three ways to dial a phone number from within an iPhone. The first was shared by Rodney in October of 2008: Launching Other Apps within an iPhone Application.
As mentioned in the above post, the UIApplication class offers a method to dial a phone number:
1 2 | [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"tel://18004664411"]]; |
The second way to dial a phone number I stumbled upon when using a UIWebview to display formatted text within an information screen of an application. In the HTML stream, I included a phone number and was caught by surprise to see that the number appeared as a hyperlink in the application, and by touching the number, I was prompted if I wanted to place a call. You can see how this looks in a very simple webview with a white background:
This of course led to looking a little further (read, opening the documentation) and sure enough, for iPhone OS 2+ there is a property detectsPhoneNumbers that looks for numbers that appear to be formatted as phone numbers. This property is on by default. For iPhone OS 3+ this property has been deprecated (more on dealing with deprecated methods) and replaced with the property dataDetectorTypes which offers a range of options for detecting phone numbers, links, etc.
The third approach is a combination of the URL idea used with UIApplication along with a UIWebview and a hyperlink. With this approach you can display text that represents a phone number, versus the actual numbers. See the screenshot below:
What follows is a short example that shows the two options for dialing a number from within a UIWebview.
Keeping things short and sweet, this example using one class, the app delegate, here’s how the applicationDidFinishLoading method looks:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 | - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application { window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]]; // Define the frame (location/size) for the webview UIWebView *webView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 20, 320, 35)]; webView.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor]; [webView setOpaque:NO]; // Access the html file NSString *textpath = @"about.txt"; NSString *filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:textpath ofType:nil]; NSString *html = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:filePath]; // Define the html body info NSString *htmlOpen = @"<body>"; NSString *htmlClose = @"</body>"; // The overall document structure NSString *bodyhtml = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ %@ %@", htmlOpen, html, htmlClose]; // Load the html in the webview [webView loadHTMLString:bodyhtml baseURL:nil]; // Add webview to current view [window addSubview:webView]; // self.view retained the webview, we can release it [webView release]; [window makeKeyAndVisible]; } |
I setup a typical HTML body tag (open and close) and reference the file about.txt which holds the HTML for the phone numbers. The file about.txt is quite simple, and looks as follows:
<center> <p>1-800-466-4411</p> <a href="tel://8004664411">GOOG-411</a> </center>
If you are aware of other ways to dial a phone number from within an iPhone application, please post a comment.
iPhone OS 2+ used to make it so easy to post a number in a UIWebView. Now, with detectsPhoneNumbers being deprecated, I am stuck trying to find suitable documentation for dataDetectorTypes. Appl’s docs are so matter-of-fact with little to no examples given.
You would think that webView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber; would work simply enough, but, even tho no errors are give, no phone number links are made. Am i missing something?
I think there is a forth way but I can’t figure it out. The Contacts app can send a number to the Phone app.
The cool thing about the way the Contacts app does it is that it can send a # (pound).
This means that I can setup a Contact that contains my conference call number and codes and not have to touch the phone once (use voice control).
Now here is the question: how can I send a phone number to the Phone app the way the Contacts app does it? i.e. send # and , and * key presses