How to detect dismissed TextView in TableView? - swift

Question

I have a tableView with dynamic cells with multiple TextViews. I am dismissing a keyboard with a "Cancel" and trying to determine which TextView is being dismissed to "undo" the changes made by user.
Based on this similar question: How to determine which textfield is active swift I have adapted one of the answers for the following extension:
extension UIView {
var textViewsInView: [UITextView] {
return subviews
.filter ({ !($0 is UITextView) })
.reduce (( subviews.compactMap { $0 as? UITextView }), { summ, current in
return summ + current.textViewsInView
})
}
var selectedTextView: UITextView? {
return textViewsInView.filter { $0.isFirstResponder }.first
}
}
This is working and I am presently testing in the following code:
#objc func cancelButtonAction() {
if let test = tableView.selectedTextView {
print("View Found")
}
tableView.beginUpdates()
tableView.endUpdates()
}
Doing a break at print("View Found") I can inspect "test". The following is the result.
This appears to only identify the view Test by a memory address. My question is how do I interpret this to identify the view that was being edited?
Update: There seems to be some issue in understanding. Assume I have a table with two cells and in each cell two textViews (dynamic cells). Assume the table loads by saying in the 4 textViews. "Hi John", "Hi Sam", "Bye John", "Bye Sam". Suppose the user starts editing a cell and changes one cell to read "Nachos". Then the user decides to cancel. I want to then replace with the value that was there before (from my model). I can find the textView but it now reads "Nachos". Therefore I do not know which textView to reload with the appropriate Hi and Bye.

Answer 1

Implement a placeholder for your textviews so that when their text is empty, it will have a default value. Therefore, when a user presses cancel while in focus of a textview, we can set the textview's text to its default value. See link to implement a textview placeholder.. Text View Placeholder Swift

Answer 2

I did solve this problem by adding the .tag property to the textView objects. I also dropped the extension approach and used textView delegate. The solution required me to first assign the tag and delegate = self for each textView in the tableView: cellForRowAt. The following shows one TextView of many. Notice the tag is setup so I may determine the section and the row it came from and the specific item.
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell
...
cell.directionsTextView.delegate = self
cell.directionsTextView.tag = indexPath.section*1000 + indexPath.row+1
return cell
}
Two global variables are defined in my tableView class:
var activeTextView = UITextView()
var activeTextViewPresentText = String()
The textViewDidBeginEditing captures the original state of the textView text before the user starts editing.
// Assign the newly active textview to store original value and original text
func textViewDidBeginEditing(_ textView: UITextView) {
print("textView.tag: \(textView.tag)")
self.activeTextView = textView
self.activeTextViewPresentText = textView.text
}
Lastly, if the user cancels the editing, the original text is reloaded.
#objc func cancelButtonAction() {
if activeTextView.text != nil {
activeTextView.text = activeTextViewPresentText
}
self.view.endEditing(true)
tableUpdate()
}