STPCard.brandFromString Deprecation

[crontab]

stripe-ios/Stripe/PublicHeaders/STPCard.h

Line 210 in 00d0547

+ (STPCardBrand)brandFromString:(NSString *)string DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE;

This useful function is now deprecated, what is the suggested alternative?

[joeydong-stripe]

Hi @crontab, thanks for opening an issue.

We originally publicized this method unintentionally and recently decided to deprecate it because we didn't understand the use case for it. In particular, the string values are specific to the Stripe API which is tricky to handle. We primarily expect developers to use the [STPCard brand] method and STPCardBrand enum instead of passing the string value around.

Can you give us some information about how you are/will be using this method?

[crontab]

Hi @joeydong-stripe

Our mobile app receives the card brand strings from our backend which in turn receives them from Stripe. The app among other things uses these strings to display card images to the user using your other API functions. Thus the string-to-numericID translation should happen somewhere, i.e. either on our backend (which we are a bit reluctant to do at the moment) or on the frontend/mobile side. This function did just that for us.

[joeydong-stripe]

Thanks for the extra context! This is definitely a tricky problem.

We had some discussions and although there could be a problem relying on this method if the Stripe API changes the brand identifiers, it is unlikely to happen. Therefore, we've decided to un-deprecate this method.

Please see pull request #801

[joeydong-stripe]

We've merged #801. The method will be un-marked as deprecated in the next release. Thanks again!