Question

I have created a bar over the keyboard for textfields with previous/next/done button selections. In doing so, I noticed an odd occurance with my tags that I used to navigate between the textfields. I am creating my interface programmatically with a loop, and as such, just set the tag values to the loop variable i.

I started the i variable at 0 so the very first text field created had a tag of zero. Basically what was happening is the ‘previous’ button functionality would only go so low as 1. It wouldn’t even go back to the text field with the 0 tag. The only way to fix this was to increase all tag values by 1 so the first text field started at 1 instead of zero.

Here is my code. Is there a bug in my code that I cannot see? or is this a weird issue with tags?

    -(void)gotoPrevTextfield{
// If the active textfield is the first one, can't go to any previous
// field so just return.
 UITextField *textField =  (UITextField *)[inputsView viewWithTag:0];
NSLog(@"%i",textField.tag);
NSLog(@"%i",txtActiveField.tag);
if (txtActiveField == textField) {
    NSLog(@"returning at previous");
    return;
}
else {
    NSLog(@"set responder");
    // Otherwise if a different textfield has the focus, the operation
    // of "previous" button can be done and set the previous as the first
    // responder.
    textField = (UITextField *)[inputsView viewWithTag:txtActiveField.tag - 1];
    NSLog(@"%i",textField.tag);
    NSLog(@"%i",txtActiveField.tag);
    [textField becomeFirstResponder];
}

}

Answer 1

Note that unset tags default to 0 so that is almost a poor choice. You may be getting another view that you don’t expect.

A fairly good practice is to add some constant such as 100, consider making the constant a const int or #define for clarity.