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Update the title of an MKAnnotation
Sep 17, 2015 swiftmapkitgeo

I’m building a map app where users can save personalized content and present it with custom pins, icons, colors etc. I therefore need to update how an MKAnnotation is presented and its title.

When the user taps a pin on the map, the app will reverse geocode its coordinate and use it to display the full address in the callout subtitle.

iOS Simulator Screen

This may seem trivial, but was a hassle. If the geocoding operation takes too long and completes after the callout has been shown, the label text is not changed.

Turns out that you have to add some more code to make this work. Instead of just setting the subtitle, you have to tell the app that you will change it, change it, then tell the app that you have changed it.

The code for this becomes:

myAnnotation.willChangeValueForKey("subtitle")
myAnnotation.subtitle = "An address somewhere in the world"
myAnnotation.didChangeValueForKey("subtitle")

As soon as I added this extra piece of code to the app, the reverse geocoder could update the subtitle without problems, even when the operation took some time.

Since my annotations inherit a class called MapAnnotation, I decided to specify the subtitle as such:

var subtitle: String? {
   willSet { willChangeValueForKey("subtitle") }
   didSet { didChangeValueForKey("subtitle") }
}

This triggers the required events in the correct order, every time the subtitle property value is changed.