I have a view with a textfield at the top, a textview under it and two buttons below the textview.
The keyboard is configured with a "Done" button. Once the user has typed in their info, they click the save button, which is below the textview. First they click Done to hide the keyboard (and reveal the save button) then click the save button.
I need to allow carriage returns in the textview but "Return" is already taken up by Done.
How is it usually handled when you need a Return key and ability to also hide the keyboard?
Drag a button into your view, delete the text, and resize it to take up the entire view. In the document outline, select the new button and drag it to the top of the list of elements. This puts it in the background so it is not hiding the elements of your view.
Add this code to your ViewController:
#IBAction func hideKeyboard(sender: AnyObject) {
self.textField.resignFirstResponder()
}
Link the button to this action and you're all set.
If you're using a UINavigationBar or have other buttons or fields, activating any of those UIControls could be detected and used to dismiss the keyboard via resignFirstResponder(). In fact Save/Cancel/Done are UIBarButtonItems and are a standard mechanism for completing things and changing state, and create a framework for accomplishing what you want. If you don't take that approach then you have to get creative with how you do it, and also make it clear to the user what needs to be done.
In Interface Builder you can change the type of your main view from UIView to UIControl and then use addTarget() to detect touch events as a 'touch outside' area and use those actions to resign first responder as well. But you might want to consider a UINavigationBar or some other button bar or tab interface to make state transitions.
Also review iOS Human Interface Guidelines document. It's a great document for understanding how iOS is designed to handle common situations like what you are dealing with, and it can get you out of design ruts. It's well written and worth re-visiting periodically.
Related
Typically, the UIBarButtonItem will be highlighted when we tap it.
However, I intend to show the users that the action is automatically done for them when the view is loaded after 4 sec.
So I want to highlight the Button without tapping it.
How can I achieve that?
For a UIVIew object such as a UIButton, you can either use the following code Glow category on UIView that adds support for making views glow or use this example.
If you are using the first one, you can just call startGlowing and stopGlowing. When you call startGlowing, the view will start to pulse with a soft light, this effect is removed when stopGlowing is called. Check this.
For UIBarButtonItem, you might have to use the solution provided here.
I am working on a iOS project where I want to implement a search functionality. I'm using UISearchBar and UISearchDisplayController and I would like to make UISearchBar implicitly hidden. When user taps on the UIBarButtonItem, the search bar will appear and "becomeFirstResponder", whereas when user clicks on the Cancel button in the search bar, it should disappear.
The appearing is working correctly, but I have a problem with disappearing. I managed to hide the search bar when user taps on the Cancel button (searchBarCancelButtonClicked method), but I'm unable to hide the search bar when the grey (dimmed) background in UISearchDisplayController is tapped. As far as I know, there is no method to detect this event, so it is necessary to apply some hack. Do you know any, or what is the best way to detect tapping on the gray background?
So I've finally worked it out. Apart from the searchBarCancelButtonClicked:(UISearchBar *)searchBar, it is also necessary to hide the search bar in searchDisplayControllerDidEndSearch:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller. It looks this callback is called even when the gray (dimmed) background is tapped, so it can be easily used for hiding the search bar.
UISearchDisplayController usually consists of a UISegmentedControl, the UIResultsTable and the keyboard. The results table is where you want to detect this touch to dismiss. With that being known, maybe you can add a transparent UIButton to that view that dismisses first responder, or Maybe you can add a UIGestureRecognizer on a transparent view that achieves the same effect? Just thinking off the top and have not tried this myself, if it works for you im glad !
I have a somewhat complex iOS view hierarchy. One piece of text is an editable UITextField. When the user touches it, it becomes first responder, and is editable.
Here's the rub, though: Best practice should be that a touch anywhere outside the edit control causes it to resign first responder and end editing. What's the best way of accomplishing this?
Techniques I've tried:
Use the exclusiveTouch property, which stops the user from interacting with other controls, but doesn't cause editing to end. Also disallows user from interacting with my toolbar "Done" button.
Put a see-through UIView under the text field control and on top of everything else (except the toolbar), and use touches there to end editing. This works, but I end up reparenting the text field onto this other random view which sits above my whole hierarchy, which means I have to take care of the text field's layout in multiple places, since it no longer lives in the place where it lived originally, and I have to delegate all its behavior back and forth from its "shield" view to its native home container, which has all the related logic.
Is there an elegant solution to this problem that I'm missing? I figure it must be a common design issue.
Thanks.
Tile 4 "see-thru" views around the textview to capture/ignore touches. Doesn't require modifying or "lifting" the textview, and can be added to the parent view in a fairly modular way.
You can't mask a region without knowing what that mask will cover and what the mask will not cover. So any solution will require enough reach to gather both of those bounds. Either pass the text rect up, or the view rect/region to be disabled down, or both to something in-between. The controller for the stuff to be covered seems as good a place as any to consolidate both rects or regions, if not the controller for the text view.
The nub of the issue is what constitutes "best practice". The fact that the keyboard remains unless the user dismisses it is deliberate. For example, many apps need the user to be able to tap a button while still working in a text field.
The keyboard has a Return button. "Best practice" is to respond to the user tapping that button by resigning first responder. Otherwise, you should leave the keyboard there, since that's what the user expects.
However, if you insist on doing it your way, there's a simple solution: put a UITapGestureRecognizer on the background view. Its handler will be triggered if the user taps on the background or on any button or similar in the interface. So, presuming you have kept a record of what the first responder is, you can send resignFirstResponder to the first responder in the tap gesture recognizer's handler.
If you change your base view to a UIControl you can add an IBAction to that layer that resigns your text field as first responder.
Also, if you have multiple touch events, make sure they each becomeFirstResponder when touched.
I'd love to have some more details to qualify my explanations xD
Im working on a small app that displays contact and biography details.
You can see two screenshot here: contactDetails, biogDetails.
At the moment I have an Action button on the right hand side of the NavigationBar that displays an ActionSheet where the user can perform various actions like:
"add to favorites"
"update data",
"Biog Details", etc.
I feel the "Biog Details" is not an action as the others and I would like to display it on a different way.
I was wondering if there is a way to add an extra custom button to the PersonViewController.
I dont really want to create a lookalike of the PersonViewController, because i would lose functionality that I can replicate with the public APIs.
The other option could maybe be to have a segmentedController on the center of the NavigationBar that would switch between the two viewsControllers. How could I do that?
Im open to ideas.
Thanks,
The only way you'll be able to add that extra button is if you use the UIToolBar instead of the UINavigationBar.
If you decide to use the UISegmentedControl you'll also have to use the UIToolBar.
You can duplicate the UISegmentedControl on both views but with the appropriately selected segment on either.
Or you could use one "base" view, add the other two as subviews and hide/unhide the appropriate view depending on the segment that is selected. This would however mean that you change the position of the subviews (by adjusting their rect parameters) so that they appear just below the UIToolBar
I have a main view that has has two buttons on it that control methods to display the next image and display the previous image. In this case the 'Image' is a class that inherits from UIImageView and has multiple pictures on it that you can interact with, and I call this class a 'Pane'. The pane itself handles all the user interaction itself while the main view controls the display of next and previous panes with the buttons. Here is my dilemma, because the pane fully covers the main view it wont allow for the user to tap the buttons on the main view! So once a pane pops up you cannot change it via the buttons! Is there a way to allow touches through transparent parts of a view, or if not how in the world do I achieve this?!
I cannot pass touchesBegan or any of those methods from the pane to the superview because all of the button touch methods are created in the xib file.
I cannot insert the pane under the control panel because then you wouldn't be able to interact with the pane. And as far as I know theres no way to pass touch events to every single pane within the paneHoldingArray that belongs to the main view
I cannot add the command buttons inside of the pane because I want to be able to replace the command button's image with a thumbprint render of the next/previous pane.
I've been stuck on this for a very long time, please somebody help me out with a fix action or a new way to re-engineer the code so that it will work!
If you want the buttons to capture events, then layer them above the pane. You say you cannot put the control panel above the pane, so break the buttons out into another view that you can put above the pane. If you want the buttons to appear under other views, then make some completely transparent custom buttons to handle you actions that you can layer on top.
I don't know what you mean by the button touch methods are created in the xib file, but in general you cannot effectively pass touch events around. You must organize the view hierarchy so that the views you want to receive events are logically on top. However, nothing says that the views on top have to be opaque or even visible.