iOS 11 - Dropbox app not handling NSURLs from UIActivityItemProvider objects

You can close this question...I discovered either the problem, my own bug or a workaround - not sure which. I do not think this ever was a Dropbox issue. I'm familiar with the calls made to UIApplication for incoming files. Due to the nature of the solution, I don't think the file was being ignored by Dropbox, but was probably never even passed to it by iOS to begin with.

My fix...

In my code, I have different custom objects that respond to the UIActivityItemSource protocol. I supply them to varying UIActivityViewControllers across my app. These objects are init'ed with a placeholder item which, according to Apple's docs, can be empty - as long as it is the same class I plan to supply later when the user chooses an action. I return that placeholder item when asked by the UIActivityViewController according to the UIActivityItemSource protocol.

Assuming the name was unmimportant, I used to create these objects with a placeholder file URL as following.

DHDatabaseExportActivityItemSource *p = [[[DHDatabaseExportActivityItemSource alloc] initWithPlaceholderItem:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"something"]] autorelease];

That worked fine, until recently - probably after recompiling with iOS 11. But, updating the fake name to include an extension of the type I plan to supply later solves the issue, e.g. “Something.sqlite”. Now the file is successfully passed to the Dropbox App. Just to be safe, I go ahead and prepare the real name I plan on using, e.g.

DHDatabaseExportActivityItemSource *p = [[[DHDatabaseExportActivityItemSource alloc] initWithPlaceholderItem:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:@“My Database.sqlite"]] autorelease];

So - sorry to waste time. I don't really think this is Dropbox's fault. But, perhaps a future googler will get some help by reading this, since something, somewhere has definitely changed.

Kind regards,
Danny