I am working on supporting some formatted text editing in my app, and I've been experimenting with copy and paste support for formatted text. I discovered that NSAttributedString implements NSItemProviderWriting, which means I can give it to UIPasteboard via setObjects and all the built-in attributes transfer perfectly if I then paste it into another text view, or even another app that behaves itself.
But if I have custom attributes in my attributed string, having their values implement Codable doesn't let them transfer across the clipboard. In my implementation of textPasteConfigurationSupporting(_: transform:), I try to get an attributed string like this:
let attr = item.itemProvider.loadObject(ofClass: NSAttributedString.self) { val, err in
//...handle here
}
I get an error like this:
Error Domain=NSItemProviderErrorDomain Code=-1000 "Cannot load representation of type com.apple.uikit.attributedstring" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Cannot load representation of type com.apple.uikit.attributedstring, NSUnderlyingError=0x600003e7bea0 {Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The file “b036c42113e34c2f9d9af14d6fefcbd534f627d6” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file." UserInfo={NSURL=file:///Users/username/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/86E8BDD4-B6AA-4170-B0EB-57C74EC7DDF0/data/Library/Caches/com.apple.Pasteboard/eb77e5f8f043896faf63b5041f0fbd121db984dd/b036c42113e34c2f9d9af14d6fefcbd534f627d6, NSFilePath=/Users/username/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/86E8BDD4-B6AA-4170-B0EB-57C74EC7DDF0/data/Library/Caches/com.apple.Pasteboard/eb77e5f8f043896faf63b5041f0fbd121db984dd/b036c42113e34c2f9d9af14d6fefcbd534f627d6, NSUnderlyingError=0x600003e7ac70 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 "No such file or directory"}}}}
But I tried making my custom attribute values implement NSSecureCoding, and then it worked.
Why is Codable conformance not enough here? Is it because the code that serializes and deserializes is still in Objective-C and isn't aware of Codable? Will this change as the open-source Foundation in Swift work continues?
