Hacking with Aspects

I’ve recently spent a few days extracting and polishing the AOP code from PSPDFKit, and the result of this is called Aspects - a delightful, simple library for aspect oriented programming.

Now Aspects is a great new tool in your toolkit. It allows to call code before, instead or after the original implementation, and there’s no need to manually call super, cast objc_msgSend or any of that other stuff you have to should do on swizzling. Use it with reason, it has a few great use cases, some are well-explaind on the GitHub page.

It’s also great for hacking and debugging. While testing the example on an iPad that still runs iOS 6, I found this exception: // *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'On iPad, UIImagePickerController must be presented via UIPopoverController'

Right, Apple fixed that in iOS 7. But I was more curious how this is actually implemented. It’s actually quite tricky to detect if you are inside a popover or not, and sometimes this quite important to know. Has Apple some “secret sauce” they’re using here? I opened Hopper to find out.

That’s roughly their code, converted back from assembly. Interesting that there’s a _UIImagePickerControllerAllowAnySuperview to disable this check. You have to wonder where they are using that… The check is otherwise quote straightforward. The interesting part is here: [_UIPopoverView popoverViewContainingView:self.view].

Let’s look up that as well…

Ha. There’s no secret sauce here. Apple is simply iterating the view hierarchy to find the _UIPopoverView. Fair enough, it’s a simple solution. Sadly there’s no _UIPopoverView for us mere mortals, it’s a private class.

Now, let’s test if this disassembly is actually correct! First, we’ll disable Apple’s check:

That’s all - this makes the controller work perfectly where it threw an exception before. The popover restriction was a pure could be a political one, or there are edge cases we don’t know.

Putting it all together

Now, we want to implant our own check using Aspects. PLLibraryView is again private, so we’ll use a runtime class lookup to hook it globally. I also commented out the property check since this would disable our own checking code.

That’s it!

This code isn’t of much use, but it’s interesting how Apple checks these things internally, and that their popover detection really is just subview querying. And while _UIPopoverView is private, we could easily make this check working without flagging private API by testing for parts of the class name…