how to get input from UIAlertView? - iphone

I want take player name as input by using UIAlertView. Is it possible to add textField on the UIAlertView?

Since iOS 5, UIAlertView provides this: change the alertViewStyle property to one of the following:
UIAlertViewStylePlainTextInput (1 text field)
UIAlertViewStyleSecureTextInput (1 password field)
UIAlertViewStyleLoginAndPasswordInput (both a text field and password field)
Then use textFieldAtIndex: to get the text field you want. This way, you can even use the alertViewShouldEnableFirstOtherButton: delegate method to enable the button.

Yes, it's definitely possible, and it isn't a hack. You would need to subclass UIAlertView and place controls into it. Since it's a subclass, it will retain the same look & feel, etc.
For full details, see this tutorial by Jeff LaMarche (co-author of Beginning iPhone Development, from Apress).

Yes, but not without some hacking, see this previous question.
You'd have to directly manipulate the UIAlertView's subviews and add a UITextField and then resize the UIAlertView's frame. You're better off creating your own view.

Related

Xcode iPhone - Class that asks for multiple text inputs and then returns them

I wan't to creata a "CatchNames" class which I can import into a view Controller that shows a text which asks for text input. I would like to be able to add an instance of CatchNames to my view, have it ask the user for three names in a row and return them in an array.
[self.view addSubview:[catchNames view]];
NSArray *myNamesArray = [catchNames namesArray];
The best way would be to have the application freeze kind of the way it does when you are prompted to enter a password in iOS and continue when the user entered 3 names so I can immediately catch the array in the next line.
While this might not be the best description I still hope you understand my problem.
How can I approach this?
Thank you in advance
I guess you appear to be looking to implement a simple form which gets the user input, retrieves and stores it in an array? Hopefully I haven't misunderstood the question, but this seems to be a simple task you can accomplish with one or more UITextField's and a UIButton as a 'Add' or 'Done' call to action.
Are you looking for some general UI coding level help regarding implementing such a view? If so, I would encourage taking a look at the XCode documentations of UITextField (for capturing text), UIButton (for handling actions) and UIView (for view hierarchy and animation implementation).
Some quick notes;
Looks like 3 names are compulsory, so, you may verify whether a UITextField is empty at the button's click action.
Have the array declared in the view controller, not the view
The 'freezing' you require should take care of itself as long as the view offers no other way out for the user other than clicking the button.
Do excuse me if I am oversimplifying the problem. Let me know if you need me to drill down into anything further.
Cheers!

How can I send characters to cursor position of UISearchBar?

I am trying to add a couple characters that are inconveniently located in the normal keyboard, and place them in a toolbar so that the user can use them just like normal keys.
Does anyone have a useable way to do this?
I found an article explaining how to do this by simulating a "Paste" operation, (remove pasteboard contents, replace with my character, paste into field, return original pasteboard contents) but my trouble is that I'm trying to do this with a UISearchBar, which seems to have no paste selector.
Update
I found a lead:
UIKIT_CLASS_AVAILABLE(2_0) #interface UISearchBar : UIView {
#private
UITextField *_searchField;
Since it is documented that there's a UITextField in a search bar, if I were to root through the searchbar's subviews and locate said text field, (assuming with 99% certainty that the text field has a delegate) would it make sense that I could "steal" the text field and make my class the delegate, then forward the messages to the original delegate once I'm done with them?
This is definitely tricky. UISearchBar doesn't give you inputAccessoryView and nor do you get selectedRange.
You can paste in a UISearchBar. If you want to get your tricky characters to the pasteboard, you could get a button to execute something such as:
[[UIPasteboard generalPasteboard] setString:#"[*]"];
and then get the user to use paste in the UISearchBar. Pretty awkward for the user though.
Rooting through the subviews to find the UITextField might work. If you do this, you'd need to grab the existing delegate and make yourself the delegate. Then your delegate would need to transmit messages on. The process is described in this stackoverflow question and answer. Potential challenges here: (a) the Apple implementation could change between iOS updates and even, though unlikely, change the delegate during the lifetime of the UISearchBar; (b) Apple might see this as using a private API and reject the app. (I don't have any hard evidence of (b), but it's something to consider.)
One approach might be to use the bookmark button. The UISearchBar delegate can detect this. You could use that to insert your special characters or offer up a menu of special character insertions. Of course, you won't know where the cursor is. But, depending on your use case, appending the special characters at the end might be OK. Perhaps this doesn't get you anything over a button on your interface that just appends something.
[[self searchBar] setText: [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#[*]", [[self searchBar] text]]].)
Implementing your own search bar might be the best way to go as already suggested #hyperbole. I've done this successfully by adding a custom UITextField (with my own magnifying glass in the leftView slot etc.) and adding it as the titleView of my navigationBar. But, if I understand your question aright, that still won't be enough, as UITextField doesn't provide selectedRange and its delegate doesn't provide an equivalent of textViewDidChangeSelection:. You might have a go with a UITextView that is fixed to one line (with scrolling clamped down if required - it often seems to be).
Can't you simply set the text of the UISearchBar? Of course, the tricky part is to determine the cursor position. For that, you can register a UITapGestureRecognizer on the UISearchBar, determine the tap co-ordinates & calculate the cursor position using - (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font forWidth:(CGFloat)width lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode or its variants.
You may also have to register a UIPanGestureRecognizer, as the user can change the cursor position by tapping, dragging & then releasing the finger.
HTH,
Akshay

how do I know when UIKeyboard Join button is tapped?

How do I know when a user taps on the Join button on the UIKeyboard?
Also can this text be changed? I know there are several built options but I nee done that says 'Login' if I can.
I'm not a big fan of using UITextField delegate just for knowing when keyboard entry is completed by pressing the "return" on the keyboard (whatever it's labeled). UITextField actually works well with a Target/Action pattern which is much simpler and far more direct than using the delegate for this.
I've pointed this out before in an answer to "How to call a method when the Done Button in the KeyBoard is Clicked?". Please take a look at that for the details of using the traditional target/action pattern to know when keyboard entry is complete. Unfortunately, Apple's documentation isn't as clear is it could be on this subject.
UITextField delegate has its place, but if all you need is to know when entry is complete then using the delegate likely isn't the best approach. Use target/action.
For the UIReturnKeyType choices, see the returnKeyType property in the UITextInputTraits Protocol Reference.
You should set your delegate of your UITextField (I'm assuming that's a UITextField) and check for that delegate call :
- (BOOL)textFieldShouldReturn:(UITextField *)textField
Also, you return a BOOL to tell the UITextField to do its default behavior or not. You can check the documentation here.
Also, the options Apple gives you for the UIReturnKeyType are your only options.

iPhone Checkboxes à la Mail

After reading the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, I notice there's little mention of checkboxes in the style that one may encounter them on the desktop or web.
Checkboxes are generally handled by UISwitchs on the iPhone, but for an app I'm presently working on, they're really not the right control. Instead, the control you'll see in Mail is a much better fit:
Actual mail blanked out. Obviously.
How would I go about using these checkbox controls in my app? Are they standard, or will I need to imitate them with a custom control?
Cheers friends.
You'll need to create a custom control. It won't be difficult since UIControl already has 'selected', 'highlighted' and 'state' properties at your disposal. You'll just need to draw and toggle appropriately.
Don't subclass UIControl. What you want is a UIButton of "custom" type. Load it with your "unlit" image in IB (or programmatically in -viewDidLoad--you can set it appropriate to its data there too, if you came here with that property already "checked").
Point its touchUpInside event at a method called -(void)toggleCheckBox, and in that method, toggle whatever setting you're toggling (probably a BOOL property of the objects you're listing), and toggle the "lit/unlit" status of the button image by using its -setImage: forState: method. Use the control state UIControlStateNormal.
I do something similar where I let people poke a button to toggle the "favorite" status of the thing ("thisEvent"--a member of an array of local cultural/arts events) they're looking at:
- (IBAction)toggleFavorite {
if (self.thisEvent.isFavorite == YES) {
self.thisEvent.isFavorite = NO;
[self.favoriteButton setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"notFavorite.png"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
}
else {
self.thisEvent.isFavorite = YES;
[self.favoriteButton setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"isFavorite.png"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
}
}
I'm pretty certain there is no standard way to do this. However it's fairly simple to achieve, all you need is two images, one for each state. I would probably do something simple like subclass UIImageView and add a setState:(BOOL)theState method, which would then simply select the relevant image.
I'd rather subclass UITableViewCell then UIImageView. UITableViewCell allready comes with selected/unselected states and handlers for editmodes etc.
As said before, you'll need to subclass UIControl. The actual process was discussed here w little while ago.
I also found a description of another way to do this using the same image/method that the Mail app uses:
http://networkpx.blogspot.com/2009/07/multiple-row-selection-with-uitableview.html
but as this implements undocumented features of the iOS SDK, it may not be best for apps intended for the official App Store.

Detect when a user clicks the paste button in a UITextView

I am having quite a issue trying to change the cut/copy/paste behavior of the UITextView.
What I want to achieve is: detect when the user has pasted some text into the UITextView. When I detect this I will then check the data and do my thing.
According to the documents, I found out about UIResponder.
So I created an simple class that inherits UITextView.
in the .m file I create 1 function called.
-(void) paste:(id)sender{
NSLog(#"paste button was pressed do something");
}
But for some reason it never seems to fire. I could get the select statement working and tracing data.
-(void) select:(id)sender
1. Is this the correct way to detect Paste in a UITextView?
2. Right now I am tracking buy how many Characters UITextView changes and if its greater than one char then I suspect that it could be a paste operation. But since the iPhone can autocomplete words eg Wedn (goes to Wednesday) its possibly not a paste operation.
In Interface Builder, I selected my textView in my NIB file, and selected its "Class Identity" to my nearly created class before and I know that this file was working as a subclass but it just would not respond to the Paste event.
thanks.
UITextView has a view that handles the cut, copy, paste. It's UIWebDocumentView. So if UITextView is the first responder, UIWebDocumentView will get it first instead of your implementation. I would like to overwrite these functions so this is very frustrating.
Same thing happens to me too. Select (and copy sometimes) gets called but paste never.
I have simulated the behavior using textViewDidChange where I always verify the difference between the current text and the previous one. If there are more letters different and the text.length is bigger than it must have been pasted.
Hope Apple will fix this.
In case somebody still needs short and easy solution I'll share mine. I use wonderfull NSObject+REResponder category from REKit project. The solution is as easy as this:
- (void)hookMessageTextFieldPasteAction
{
void (^textFieldDidPasteBlock)(id receiver, id sender) = ^(id receiver, id sender)
{
NSLog(#"paste hook");
};
[self.messageTextField respondsToSelector:#selector(paste:) withKey:nil usingBlock:textFieldDidPasteBlock];
}
Yes your above code for paste is correct according to Apple's Documentation which refers to it here.
- (void)paste:(id)sender
I suspect you are implementing it in the wrong file. You should be implementing it in a file that is part of the 1st Responder chain. Have you subclassed the UITextView or are you using a vanilla one in your ViewController?
Hmmm I think the problem is that you may need to make your UITextView subclass become the delegate in order for the delegate method to work, because it's not by the looks of things. I'll try to find how i did that before.
Okay think i found it. I think you need to do this on your subclassed UITextField class:
#interface mySpecialTextFieldClass : NSObject <UITextFieldDelegate>
{
}
Adding that onto the end should work, give it a try!
What it does is makes your subclass become an object of a type that the delegate can send a notification to...it's polymorphism, unless someone wants to correct me here :)
One last thing to try John, in the ViewController which contains the IBOutlet to the UITextView, try calling this method on the instance of the UITextView:
[myUITextView setDelegate:self];
Just to throw something completely random in there try setting it to become first responder.
[myUITextView becomeFirstResponder];
This is called programming in the dark kiddies! And is a very bad way to program, but I admit I do it and sometimes it pays off :P lol.