Prevent Sharing of PDF Files on iOS

PSPDFKit enables you to customize the document sharing experience. To prevent your end users from sharing documents, you need to exclude the bar button items that allow sharing from your PDFViewController’s navigation item’s leftBarButtonItems or rightBarButtonItems.

Here’s the list of bar button items you need to exclude from the main toolbar:

Property Description
openInButtonItem Presents the UIDocumentInteractionController controller to open a document in other apps.
emailButtonItem Presents the MFMailComposeViewController to send a document via email.
messageButtonItem Presents the MFMessageComposeViewController to send a document via SMS/iMessage.
activityButtonItem Presents the UIActivityViewController for various actions, including many of the above button items.

The example below shows how to customize the main toolbar’s button to prevent sharing:

let pdfController = ...

// Make sure `activityButtonItem`, `openInButtonItem`, `emailButtonItem`, and `messageButtonItem` are excluded from the `leftButtonItems` and `rightButtonItems` arrays.
let leftButtonItems = [controller.settingsButtonItem, controller.outlineButtonItem]
let rightButtonItems = [controller.searchButtonItem, controller.annotationButtonItem]

pdfController.navigationItem.setLeftBarButtonItems(leftButtonItems, for: .document, animated: false)
pdfController.navigationItem.setRightBarButtonItems(rightButtonItems, for: .document, animated: false)

For more details, see both our guide about customizing the main toolbar and the sharing examples from PSPDFKit Catalog.