Question

I have a text field that is being shown in a UITableViewCell and I want to be able to hide the keyboard when the user touches anywhere else on the screen aside from the text field. I know about [field resignFirstResponder];, but I don’t know how to intercept touches on the background of the UITableView in order to call “resignFirstResponder”.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The only way to do this is to subclass the UITableView, implement the touchesBegan method in your subclassed UITableView and send your UITextField objects to the UITableView. Here’s how it should look like –

//  GRTableView.h
//  StackOverflow Example
//
//  Created by Raphael Caixeta on 8/13/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Raphael Caixeta. All rights reserved.
//

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>


@interface GRTableView : UITableView <UITableViewDelegate> {

    UITextField *textField;

}

@property(nonatomic, retain) UITextField *textField;

@end

//
//  GRTableView.m
//  StackOverflow Example
//
//  Created by Raphael Caixeta on 8/13/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Raphael Caixeta. All rights reserved.
//

#import "GRTableView.h"

@implementation GRTableView
@synthesize textField;

- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    [textField resignFirstResponder];
    [super touchesBegan:touches withEvent:event];       
}

- (void)dealloc {
    [super dealloc];
}


@end

And then in your regular file where you’ll allocate a UITableView, just allocate the subclassed view and pass your textfield to the subclass. Hope that helps.