can I get current location in widgetKit

As far as I can tell in my app I am requesting current location in the app and in the widget the same, but I am not ever seeing my widget make the network call the I would expect if current location was successful.

I have the same info plist permissions for usage and request for access in both the app and the widget ( runs the same shared code ).

My question is does widgetKit work to get core location similar to the the way that today extensions work.

or do I need to cache it from the phone app and hope its been updated ?


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Posted by
orff
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Core Location should be available to your Widget. I'll assume your network call is custom code. In order to make network calls using your Widget you should use a background session and process the response using onBackgroundURLSessionEvents from your Static or Intent Configuration.
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ricob
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Core Location should be available to your Widget. I'll assume your network call is custom code. In order to make network calls using your Widget you should use a background session and process the response using onBackgroundURLSessionEvents from your Static or Intent Configuration.
Posted by
ricob
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When testing your theory, I first added some debugging by populating the view with some mock data to verify that the location was indeed authorized. From what I can tell the location is either not authorized or never gets set in widgetKit. Thanks for your suggestion to use the background downloader though. Once I get past the getting the coordinates in the widget, I will look into this if its still failing.
Posted by
orff
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You need to make sure you have both these plist values set in your widgets Info.plist file:

Code Block 
<key>NSWidgetWantsLocation</key>
<true/>
<key>NSLocationUsageDescription</key>
<string>Put some text here</string>


Then when you open the widget gallery, looks like from beta5 onwards iOS will show a prompt asking you to allow/deny location permissions to the widget.

The next important thing is that inside getTimeline() if you are creating an instance of CLLocationManager you must keep a reference to it past the end of the getTimeline call otherwise no updates will happen on the delegate. In my case I just created a wrapper class that the widget stores as a property then I setup the CLLocationManager instance on the first run of getTimeline and assign it to a field in the wrapper class.

At least this worked for me :)

Posted by
markdaws
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WidgetKit does not support continuous location updates like today extensions; you should consider caching the location in your phone app and updating it when necessary for your widget.

Posted by
yerimanderi
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