Question

For some reason, I’m having trouble with making a textfield the first responder.

I have a UITableView with two rows. Each row has a label and a UITextField. The textfields are tagged kLoginRowIndex = 0 and kPasswordRowIndex = 1. As you might have guessed, I use this for setting login and password.

If the user taps on the return button when editing the login textfield, I want the password textfield to get the focus. Unfortunately, the password textfield doesn’t accept the focus. Here is my code:

- (BOOL)textFieldShouldReturn:(UITextField *)textField {
    NSLog(@"%s:(textField.tag:%d)", __FUNCTION__, textField.tag);
    [textField resignFirstResponder];
    if(textField.tag == kLoginRowIndex) {
        UITableViewCell *cell = [self tableView:self.tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:[NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:kPasswordRowIndex inSection:0]];
        UITextField *nextTextField = (UITextField *)[cell viewWithTag:kPasswordRowIndex];
        NSLog(@"(nextTextField.tag:%d)", nextTextField.tag);
        NSLog(@"canBecomeFirstResponder returned %d", [nextTextField canBecomeFirstResponder]);
        NSLog(@"becomeFirstResponder returned %d", [nextTextField becomeFirstResponder]);
    } else {
        [self validate:textField];
    }
    return NO;
}

This is the log output:

-[SettingsViewController textFieldShouldReturn:]:(textField.tag:0)
(nextTextField.tag:1)
canBecomeFirstResponder returned 1
becomeFirstResponder returned 0

What I tried:

• returning YES instead of NO
• removing the call to canBecomeFirstResponder (which is just for debugging purposes)

Any hints are appreciated!

Answer 1

After playing with the suggestion of tmadsen, I found the error. The mistake is this line:

UITableViewCell *cell = [self tableView:self.tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:[NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:k

It returns a new cell, not the one currently on the screen. I replaced it with

UITableViewCell *cell = [self.tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:[NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:kPasswordRowInde

and now it works as expected.

On a side note, I found out that 0 is the default value for the tag property, so it’s probably not so clever to use it.