UITextView: Must I always resignFirstResponder? - objective-c

Must I always resignFirstResponder for a UITextView? Or, will this happen automatically when its view controller disappears?
I'm asking because I'm having an issue similar to iPhone Objective-C: Keyboard won't hide with resignFirstResponder, sometimes, where the keyboard stays up even when the nav controller pushes and pops other view controllers. The keyboard works, and when I hit done, it unfocuses the UITextView (i.e., the cursor disappears), but the keyboard stays up.
I never found out why this is happening, but maybe it's due to not doing resignFirstResponder before pushing another view controller, but I thought it was optional?

At a total guess, the UITextView has a reference to the view controller (as its delegate) but does not retain it. When you go to the next screen, the controller is dealloced and then the UITextView (which has perhaps been retained by something else) tries to call back to the dealloced controller and crashes. When you call resignFirstResponder, you reverse the order this happens, and therefore no crash.
The way round this to add a textView.delegate = nil call in your view controller's dealloc method - obviously put it before you release the text view.

The contract between a UITextView and it's delegate says that the delegate will send -resignFirstResponder when the text view is done editing. This informs the framework that the view is done editing, fires the events relating to that (willEndEditing and didEndEditing), and allows other parts of the responder hierarchy to react accordingly. Failing to do so might work, but it's not following the contract (that's all a protocol is) it agreed to.

I don't think you have to because the Xcode Sample UICatalog UITextField doesn't call resignFirstResponder before the TextViewController is popped.
The reason the keyboard got stuck for me is that I was having the same view controller present two view controllers modally at the same time, one after the other. UIKit didn't like that.

Calling resignFirstResponder makes sure that the text property contains the actual text shown in the control.
Depending on the state this is not always necessary, but if your controls have resigned first responder, you know that you're working with valid data.

Related

Determine if viewcontroller is already on stack and if so, go to or dismiss it

I have an app I am working on that has a main screen with two buttons. One will take you to a view of a GPS (map) and then once there (new VC) it has options for setting that position or bringing up a list (tableview, another VC) of all locations already tagged.
At the list VC, if you click on the table cell, it will bring up the VC with the map. Problem is, this then adds the same VC bak on the stack. If a user clicks the Cancel button, they go back ones screen, then cancel goes back another screen, etc... until back to the main.
I know I can do the [self.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES]; to pop back to root but that is not always what I want.
Also, I know I can do: [[[self presentingViewController] presentingViewController] dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
I guess what I am saying is I want to "reuse" the GPS map view so I can call it from other VC's, so that is why I didn't go with the "pass back" to calling VC. So, is there away to either when a button is pressed and is to present a new VC, can I dismiss the prior one after the new one is shown? This way, a dismiss of current VC would take me back to where I need to be.
I hope makes sense and also that this question doesn't fall into the "Not an actual question" category.
Any help or better suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thx
Geo...
If you want to jump back some number of levels in a navigation controller's VC stack, you'll probably want to use its popToViewController:animated: method. To figure out if a particular view controller is on that stack, look at the navigation controller's viewControllers property. Be careful, though, as this kind of jumping around is a rather nonstandard UI behavior (even though there's API for it) which might confuse your users.
Also, using navigation controllers and presenting modally aren't the only ways to manage multiple view controllers -- you can always set the window's rootViewController yourself (and animate the change with UIView animations), even wrapping up your custom transition type in a custom UIStoryboardSegue if you like.
You can put a delegate in the table view. So that when a cell is pressed the info is passed to the delegate method in the VC which will dismiss the table view and reloads itself with the new info. You will have to implement refresh method in that VC.

Catching Button Events from Different ViewControllers

My Setup
I have a ViewController, where users type some sort of text in there. Call it InputViewController.
I have a UIView (in a separate class), where I draw a navigation bar that has a gradient (I override drawRect for Core Graphics, hence I need to to have in a separate class) which has a button. The button takes you to a MapViewController, which allows you to add a location tag to your input. Once a location tag is added, I would like to change the button's image.
My Problem
Once the button is tapped, I need to send the user's input to the MapViewController, where a delegate is also implemented and will pass back some information back to the InputViewController. The issue here is that the button resides in the separate UIView. One way to do this is pass the UIView the information once they are set, which in turn would be passed to the MapViewController once the button is tapped. The problem here would be the delegate as the delegate needs to return to the InputViewController and not the `UIView.
I was wondering if its possible to move the UIView into the InputViewController, including the drawRect method for that view. If so, how can I do that? If not, what are other ways/suggestions I can do to have the above set up?
I guess you need to use NSNotifications for sending messages to your classes. See this.

View not updating before automatic Segue away from itself

Essentially I have a view controller where the user picks from three choices. Once the user chooses something, the view segues away to another view controller that displays some information regarding their choice for about 5 seconds and then segues back to original view controller automatically where the User must make more choices... (its basically a loop until something is accomplished).
The problem I am having is when the User touches their option, it seems to just segue back to itself without ever displaying the intermediary screen. I added a sleep(5); to the viewDidLoad but all that causes it to do is pause on the original choice screen for 5 seconds before segueing to itself. I also put in an NSLog in just to make sure it was actually using the new controller, which it is indeed.
I didn't include code since its so trivial. viewDidLoad on the new controller, has sleep(5) and the call to segue back to the original view controller.
I solved the problem by moving the code to viewDidAppear. Should have done that from the beginning honestly, just didn't think it through enough I guess.

UIViewControllers problems

Hi there and thank you in advice for your help. I have a really strange problem while working with ViewControllers in Xcode4. First of all I have to say that I'm not using storyboards and I prefer to create any UI element programmatically. So I've set a UIButton and I want that, when pressed, it brings me to a new view controller. This is the code I'm using for a button:
-(void)settingsAndExportHandle:(UIButton *)buttonSender {
SettingsViewController* settingView = [[SettingsViewController alloc] initWithNibName:#"SettingsViewController" bundle:nil];
settingView.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleFlipHorizontal;
[self presentModalViewController:settingView animated:YES];
}
This buttons is initialized and allocated in the viewDidLoad method of the RootViewController. I want to switch to the other view controller (in this case SettingsViewController) when I press the button.
The strange thing is that when I press the button, the animation that flips the controllers goes well, but when it finishes I obtain the EXACT same things that I had on the RootViewControllers (same custom views, same buttons, same all!). The question is: what I'm missing?? I have to say that I use ARC (automatic reference counting) so I can't release or dealloc the views and buttons I've created on my RootViewController.
Any help will be appreciated. Thank you all!
Pushing and and modally presenting view controllers does not deallocate the view controller that presented them. It simply adds the additional view controller to the stack. You'll need to implement a callback method so that when the user hits the button to flip back to root view controller, your settings view controller lets the root view controller know what's about to happen so you can call a method you've written to reset the interface back to whatever state you need it at. You may also be able to use viewWillAppear: but that's a little messy.
However, according to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, the user expects that when they push a view controller or modally present it, the view controller they were on will save state and be exactly the way they left it when they came back. It's disconcerting and annoying when state is not preserved while in a navigation controller context. It is especially annoying when it's modally presented.
Think about this - A user is in a hypothetical Mail app. They start typing out an email and set a font size and a color. They tap on the add attachment button, which brings up a modal view controller that allows them to select a picture. They select the picture and the modal view is dismissed, and in your implementation, the mail composing interface would have reset and the email content would be gone or at the very least the selected font size and color would be back to the default. That's not a good experience.

uitextfield delegate must be file's owner?

I've seen a few references (eg here) in response to folks having trouble getting the keyboard to dismiss in iPhone that say "double check that the delegate is attached to file's owner.
Is this necessarily true? Or just standard practice? Can't I have other objects in my nib, such as a subclass of UIViewController, and make connections to those as I like? I'd hate to have to route everything into the object that happens to be file owner.
That said, I'm having a difficult time getting the keyboard to disappear. I know it's connected to the delegate, because I can set break points and step through the code. I can see the [theTextField resignFirstResponder] get called (and return true), but the keyboard still won't go away.
Any other suggestions?
All of the controls in a particular view are intended to talk to the View Controller that owns the nib file. Even if you have, say, a UISlider that changes the value of a UITextField, this will be handled by a method in your UIViewController subclass that gets fired when the slider's value changes and updates the text in the text field. So 9 times out of 10 your UIViewController will be the nib file's owner.
Typically the text field delegate method you want to define is textFieldShouldReturn, calling resignFirstResponder on the text field, which it sounds like you've done.
Make sure that your outlet for theTextField is connected as well. It can be nil and the runtime will treat [nil resignFirstResponder] as a noop, not as an error.