Question

I display a UITableView with a search bar and scope bar buttons on load. When a user taps a scope bar button, the keyboard is displayed and the search bar gets focus (becomes first responder).

Is it possible to allow the use of the scope bar buttons to filter the table items without having the keyboard appear? The user could get the keyboard to appear by specifically tapping within the search text entry field.

Answer 1

My solution in the end involved the use of two delegate methods and a state variable on the view controller.

On the view controller i added the property

NSNumber *scopeButtonPressedIndexNumber; 

- (BOOL)searchBarShouldBeginEditing:(UISearchBar *)searchBar {  

  if (self.scopeButtonPressedIndexNumber != nil) {
    self.scopeButtonPressedIndexNumber = nil; //reset
    return NO;
  }
  else {
    return YES;  
  }

} 

- (void)searchBar:(UISearchBar *)searchBar selectedScopeButtonIndexDidChange:(NSInteger)selectedScope {
  self.scopeButtonPressedIndexNumber = [NSNumber numberWithInt:selectedScope];
} 

In essence, I capture if the scope button is pressed, and I return NO in shouldBeginEditing if that is the case. In this way, I was able to prevent focus from going to the search bar.