Microsoft Adaptive Cards in SwiftUI

In this blog post I will

introduce you to Microsoft Adaptive Cards
explain how to use its open-source, Objective-C SDK in a SwiftUI project and
give you some words of caution.

What are Adaptive Cards

Adaptive Cards are an open card exchange format enabling developers to exchange UI content in a common and consistent way.

Adaptive Cards are platform-agnostic snippets of UI, authored in JSON, that apps and services can openly exchange. When delivered to a specific app, the JSON is transformed into a native UI that automatically adapts to its surroundings. It helps design and integrate lightweight UI for all major platforms and frameworks.

As Microsoft maintains adaptive Cards, you can see its use throughout their products, e.g. Microsoft Teams or Outlook Actionable Actions.

Let's look at a straightforward example of a JSON snippet declaring a card.

{
  "type": "AdaptiveCard",
  "version": "1.0",
  "body": [
    {
      "type": "Image",
      "url": "http://adaptivecards.io/content/adaptive-card-50.png",
      "horizontalAlignment": "center"
    },
    {
      "type": "TextBlock",
      "horizontalAlignment": "center",
      "text": "Hello **Adaptive Cards!**"
    }
  ],
  "actions": [
    {
      "type": "Action.OpenUrl",
      "title": "Learn more",
      "url": "http://adaptivecards.io"
    },
    {
      "type": "Action.OpenUrl",
      "title": "GitHub",
      "url": "http://github.com/Microsoft/AdaptiveCards"
    }
  ]
}

The card, here with an image and two actions, will be rendered without having the application developer to write platform-specific code.

Example of visual representation for this card in BotFramework WebChat:

Visual Representation of Card in BotFramework WebChat

Example of visual representation for this card in Outlook Actionable Message:

Visual Representation of Card in Outlook Actionable Message

Play around with the Designer or explore the entire schema here. You find further examples, with more complexity, on the official website.

Adaptive Cards comes with a set of native platform renderers:

JavaScript
.NET (+WPF + HTML)
Windows UWP
Android
iOS

Adaptive Cards on iOS

An open-source SDK implementation, written in Objective-C, can be consumed through Cocoapods.

Be aware: the repository does have a Package.swift file but adding the package to your project does not work in Xcode.

Let's create an iOS app, implemented in SwiftUI, leveraging Adaptive Cards and rendering our example interactively.

Example of thePodfile for an Xcode project named MSAdaptiveCardExample and supporting iOS 14.

https://gist.github.com/MarcoEidinger/ae2ec0851b0a901ea6e96c908485c9d7

To use the code in Swift, let's create a necessary bridging header. A helpful guide is here.

https://gist.github.com/MarcoEidinger/092441830154febbded0a88ea599fffa

The SDK is using UIKit as UI framework. Here is an example creating a ViewController with the various SDK APIs like ACOAdaptiveCard or ACRRenderer.

https://gist.github.com/MarcoEidinger/24277a831a72bed1934b7e250208d2e3

Using the UIKit ViewController in SwiftUI requires to create a View conforming to UIViewControllerRepresentable.

https://gist.github.com/MarcoEidinger/5bb8c506ddf7765fbcfa366b0d4b102a

This view can then be embedded anywhere in a SwiftUI view hierarchy.

Example

https://gist.github.com/MarcoEidinger/a38e7315a834351e8bde15ad8753dc74

View the complete project, including a hack on making rendering images actually work, on GitHub

https://github.com/MarcoEidinger/ms-adaptivecards-ios-example

Example for Activity Update

Warning

I am skeptical, as an engineer, about the idea and costs of building a "build once, run anywhere" (cross-platform), "no/low code UI" (declarative) framework considering the differences between platforms.

Specific to Adaptive Cards, I don't see significant investments in their mobile SDKs in the last twelve months. More concerning is that the mobile SDKs still do not support templating, a vital feature introduced in 2020 for the Javascript and .NET SDKs.

Finally, there is no SwiftUI roadmap. Microsoft dropped the ball by not backing a community project to implement a native SwiftUI renderer for Adaptive Cards :(

https://github.com/gonzalezreal/AdaptiveCardUI

My conclusion: do not bother with Adaptive Cards on iOS

Microsoft Adaptive Cards in SwiftUI

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