make custom UIView become first responder in custom UITableViewCell - objective-c

Question

I have three UITableViewCell subclasses. I'm displaying these in a table view in a view controller. I have, in the view controller, returning nil for tableView:willSelectRowAtIndexPath: since I want the UITextFields, in two of my UITableViewCell subclasses, to get focus and become first responder.
For the third UITableViewCell subclass, I have a custom UIView subclass that houses a UIWebView. Currently the div in the html content loaded in the UIWebView is one line tall. I previously made the div height 100% but found that scrolling started to act up. If I tap in the div the keyboard comes up. However, if the user taps any where else within this custom UITableViewCell the UIWebView div is not selected and the keyboard does not come up.
How can I get either my custom UITableViewCell or custom UIView subclass to become the first responder? Or am I going about this the wrong way?

Answer 1

I believe you're going about this the wrong way. Returning nil for tableView:willSelectRowAtIndexPath: won't really help your cause here.
Instead, you have a couple options. First, you could make a UIButton that sits behind your text fields in your table cell which fills the entire view, and then respond to touches on it and tell the text field to become active. Like so:
Wire up the button within your UITableViewCell subclass:
[self.button addTarget:self action:#selector(handleTouch) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside];
Set focus on the text field when touched:
- (void)handleTouch
{
[self.textField becomeFirstResponder];
}
The other option, and the one I like less, is to handle the selection of the cell in the delegate methods and tell the cell's textfield to become active. Like so:
- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
MyCustomCellSubclass *cell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
[cell.textField becomeFirstResponder];
}
In which of course you would need to add a textField property to your MyCustomCellSubclass in order to do this.
Hope this helps!