#Radar

Making iBeacon region monitoring work the way it should

• Why not the default implementation?
• What does radar do
• Installation
• Getting started

##Why not the default implementation?

CoreLocation iBeacon API's don't behave quite the way you would think. For example, say you want to get notified every time you encounter any beacons with a certain UUID.

CLBeaconRegion *region = [[CLBeaconRegion alloc] initWithProximityUUID:beaconUUID identifier:@"shit"]
[locationManager startMonitoringForRegion:region];

You now walk in the vicinity of one of those beacons and your delegate's locationManager:didEnterRegion: is called.

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)lm didEnterRegion:(CLBeaconRegion):region {
    NSLog(@"%@", region.uuid); // beaconUUID
    NSLog(@"%@", region.major); // nil
    NSLog(@"%@", region.minor); // nil
}

That beacon certainly had a major and minor, but you do not get that information in your delegate. In fact it returns the exact CLBeaconRegion instance you supplied it.

Additionally, you can't specify a range for your CLBeaconRegion. If you only wanted to be notified when within a couple feet of a particular beacon, tough luck.

##What does Radar do?

Use Radar to get get full beacon info back with the same delegate. Optionally specify a required minimum proximity before notifications are triggered.

//...
region.proximity = CLProximityNear; //optional
[radar startMonitoringBeaconRegion:region];
//...

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)lm didEnterRegion:(CLBeaconRegion):region {
    NSLog(@"%@", region.uuid); // beaconUUID
    NSLog(@"%@", region.major); // real major
    NSLog(@"%@", region.minor); // real minor
}

Radar treats regions with non specific major/minor numbers as wildcards. Monitoring a wildcard region will call didEnter and didExit seperately for every matching sub-region.

##Installation

Currently only available via Carthage