Get UIWindow without using AppDelegate

Question

I need to add a view directly to the window. I can do this by accessing the window object on the AppDelegate via UIApplication. I intend on making this code as reusable as possible though which makes that method unhelpful. How can I access the UIWindow programmatically without using AppDelegate?

I'm coding in Swift but Objective-C examples may be helpful too.

score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 07 '20 at 00:13

16

Ok, figured this one out myself. You can access it like this:

var window : UIWindow = UIApplication.sharedApplication().keyWindow

Swift 5:

var window : UIWindow = UIApplication.shared.keyWindow

Note that keyWindow was deprecated in iOS 13.0. If you're targeting iOS 13.0 or higher, refer to this.

edited Aug 07 '20 at 00:13

Silis Alin

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answered Oct 17 '14 at 14:40

1

this was deprecated, how do you do this in swift 5? – Joseph Astrahan Feb 05 '20 at 02:23

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '14 at 14:19

13

Any view has a reference to the current window.

In a UIViewController:

self.view.window

answered Oct 17 '14 at 14:19

Justus1

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Hmm, I'm getting errors with that. UIWindow does not have a member named addSubview & UIWindow does not have a member names 'centre'. NB: I'm doing this on a UIView which is trying to add itself to the window when a method on it is called from a UIViewController. – Oct 17 '14 at 14:33

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 04 '19 at 16:25

4

Swift 3 version:

let window :UIWindow = UIApplication.shared.keyWindow!

edited Aug 04 '19 at 16:25

superarts.org

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answered Apr 30 '17 at 08:38

Morteza Hosseini Zadeh

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Welcome to stackoverflow. This post was of very poor quality, and needed significant improvements to be useful. Please, could you expand your answer? – Kenzo_Gilead Apr 30 '17 at 09:13

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 08 '18 at 17:51

4

The following works with Swift 4 and will safely unwrap the UIWindow so that a force cast is not required:

if let window = UIApplication.shared.keyWindow { 
    // Do stuff
}

answered Feb 08 '18 at 17:51

CodeBender

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 18 '20 at 20:16

0

You get the first window with:

let window = UIApplication.shared.windows[0]

answered Jun 18 '20 at 20:16

vvolf

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Get UIWindow without using AppDelegate

5 Answers5