How do I show the Activity Indicator in CarPlay?

Question

Created Jun ’21

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According to Apple's Documentation one should show an Activity Indicator to indicate something is loading or taking time to show on screen. This is reasonable, and I'd love to do just that...

I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I cannot figure out how to show an activity indicator in a template of a CarPlay app as I don't have access to the view. I can only interact with the templates available.

If I were trying to match the image from Apple's docs, I'd assume I would need to use the listTemplate and some how add the activity indicator to that. Has anyone else come across this? Any help would be appreciated!

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Answer 1

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

Jun ’21

If you are using CPListTemplate, the system will invoke your -[CPListItem handler] when the user taps the list item. The system provides a completion block to your handler, which you should be sure to invoke after your app finishes processing the user's selection. If your app does not immediately call the completion block, that's okay! Maybe your app needs to perform a network request that takes some time. The system will automatically add a spinner to your list item after a short delay if the completion block has not yet been called.

Another option could be to present a list template with a single list item that indicates the rest of the items are still loading/in-progress.

For the tab bar template in particular, you can update the tabs displayed after it's already been presented. For example, you could dynamically add one or more tabs if they absolutely cannot be presented immediately upon app launch.

Or, for a full-screen presentation, you could present a CPAlertTemplate to indicate an error or loading state in your app.

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Answer 2

xeaza OP

Jun ’21

Thanks for the detailed response! That is all good to know. So if I were going to display a list of items that were all requested and took some amount of time to load I could:

"Present a list template with a single list item that indicates the rest of the items are still loading/in-progress."
Dynamically load the tab displaying the list of data once the data has been loaded.
Use a full screen CPAlertTemplate

Is a CPAlertTemplate being used here in Apple's HIG for an activity indicator in CarPlay?

That's where I got the screenshot for the image above, but it actually looks like there's a full screen scrim behind the activity indicator in the image now.

Thanks!

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