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Well we have an iOS app that enables document browsing and viewing for a proprietary DMS. We are now trying to enable document editing from the app by trying to open Office documents with the official Office apps for iOS (word, Excel etc). Drop-box is our reference implementation: http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2014/11/dropbox-and-microsoft.html

From observing drop-box's behavior and its interaction with the Word app, and studying publicly available docs around creating extensions for iOS, my assumption is Dropbox is a FileProvider extension, and after the document is launched, Word uses iOS 8's FileProvider extensibility to fetch from and save the document back to Dropbox. I am also assuming Dropbox launches Word app using some sort of Action extension that Word provides.

Now although there is tons and tons of documentation available on creating app extensions in general and Action extensions as well, there's none available on how to consume an Action extension.

In this case, I am trying to pop-up that "Open with Microsoft Word" sheet to pass on the document from my app to Word and I guess the rest of the work is done by FileProvider extensibility that I would need to implement in my app.

So I have 2 questions:

  1. How do I invoke an action extension from my code. More specifically, how do I bring up that "Open with Word" sheet from my app.
  2. Is there any information available on how to invoke Office Apps for iOS from our app exactly how Dropbox does it.

UPDATE: @Vig: please see my comment below. I don't think this question is a duplicate.

r_honey
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  • Just wondering have you looked at this specific document? https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1587/_index.html – Vig Mar 16 '15 at 18:37
  • If you have and still got questions try this answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7942597/supporting-open-in-menu-item-in-my-app-for-ios-mail-and-safari – Vig Mar 16 '15 at 18:40
  • Hi @Vig, I indeed looked at those documents, but my scenario is exactly the opposite. Both of the referenced links demonstrate how to add an app to the "Open in" menu for iOS. My scenario is I already have word/excel documents in my app. On clicking on an icon in the app, I need to bring-up the "Open In" sheet so that the document can be opened in any of the registered apps for that specific document type. In other words, if I have a .docx document in my app, how to bring up the "Open In" menu for .docx document type. – r_honey Mar 17 '15 at 21:19

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