Question

I have a UITableView which I present in a UIPopoverController. The table view presents a list of elements that can be dragged and dropped onto the main view.

When the user begins a pan gesture that is principally vertical at the outset, I want the UITableView to scroll as usual. When it’s not principally vertical at the outset, I want the application to interpret this as a drag-and-drop action.

My unfortunately lengthy journey down this path has compelled me to create a custom UIGestureRecognizer. In an attempt to get the basics right, I left this custom gesturer as an empty implementation at first, one that merely calls the super version of each of the five custom methods Apple says should be overridden:

(void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event;
(void)touchesMoved:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event;
(void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event;
(void)touchesCancelled:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event;
(void)reset;

This results in nothing happening, i.e. the custom gesture’s action method is never called, and the table view scrolls as usual.

For my next experiment, I set the gesture’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan in the touchesBegan method.

This caused the gesture’s action method to fire, making the gesture appear to behave just like the standard UIPanGestureRecognizer. This obviously suggested I was responsible for managing the gesture’s state.

Next up, I set the gesture’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateChanged in the touchesMoved method. Everything still fine.

Now, instead, I tried setting the gesture’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed in the touchesMoved method. I was expecting this to terminate the gesture and restore the flow of events to the table view, but it didn’t. All it did was stop firing the gesture’s action method.

Lastly, I set the gesture’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed in the touchesBegan method, immediately after I had set it to UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan.

This causes the gesture to fire its action method exactly once, then pass all subsequent events to the table view.

So…sorry for such a long question…but why, if I cause the gesture to fail in the touchesBegan method (after first setting the state to UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan), does it redirect events to the table view, as expected. But if I try the same technique in touchesMoved (the only place I can detect that a move is principally vertical), why doesn’t this redirection occur?

Answer 1

Sorry for making this more complicated than it actually was. After much reading and testing, I’ve finally figured out how to do this.

First, creating the custom UIGestureRecognizer was one of the proper solutions to this issue, but when I made my first test of the empty custom recognizer, I made a rookie mistake: I forgot to call [super touches...:touches withEvent:event] for each of the methods I overrode. This caused nothing to happen, so I set the state of the recognizer to UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan in touchesBegan, which did result in the action method being called once, thus convincing me I had to explicitly manage states, which is only partially true.

In truth, if you create an empty custom recognizer and call the appropriate super method in each method your override, your program will behave as expected. In this case, the action method will get called throughout the dragging motion. If, in touchesMoved, you set the recognizer’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed, the events will bubble up to the super view (in this case a UITableView), also as expected.

The mistake I made and I think others might make is thinking there is a direct correlation between setting the gesture’s state and the chronology of the standard methods when you subclass a gesture recognizer (i.e. touchesBegan, touchesMoved, etc.). There isn’t – at least, it’s not an exact mapping. You’re better off to let the base behavior work as is, and only intervene where necessary. So, in my case, once I determined the user’s drag was principally vertical, which I could only do in touchesMoved, I set the gesture recognizer’s state to UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed in that method. This took the recognizer out of the picture and automatically forwarded a full set of events to the encompassing view.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve left out a ton of other stuff I learned through this exercise, but would like to point out that, of six or seven books on the subject, Matt Neuburg’s Programming IOS 4 provided the best explanation of this subject by far. I hope that referral is allowed on this site. I am in no way affiliated with the author or publisher – just grateful for an excellent explanation!