How to present UIAlertController when not in a view controller?

Question

Scenario: The user taps on a button on a view controller. The view controller is the topmost (obviously) in the navigation stack. The tap invokes a utility class method call

Answer 1

Improving on agilityvision's answer, you'll need to create a window with a transparent root view controller and present the alert view from there.

However as long as you have an action in your alert controller, you don't need to keep a reference to the window. As a final step of the action handler block, you just need to hide the window as part of the cleanup task. By having a reference to the window in the handler block, this creates a temporary circular reference that would be broken once the alert controller is dismissed.

UIWindow* window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[UIScreen mainScreen].bounds];
window.rootViewController = [UIViewController new];
window.windowLevel = UIWindowLevelAlert + 1;

UIAlertController* alertCtrl = [UIAlertController alertControllerWithTitle:... message:... preferredStyle:UIAlertControllerStyleAlert];

[alertCtrl addAction:[UIAlertAction actionWithTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"OK",@"Generic confirm") style:UIAlertActionStyleCancel handler:^(UIAlertAction * _Nonnull action) {
    ... // do your stuff

    // very important to hide the window afterwards.
    // this also keeps a reference to the window until the action is invoked.
    window.hidden = YES;
}]];

[window makeKeyAndVisible];
[window.rootViewController presentViewController:alertCtrl animated:YES completion:nil];