In my application I have a UITextField inside a UITableViewCell. If I click inside the text field and add some text I find that if try to move the insertion point it works the first time but fails on subsequent attempts. I am completely unable to move the selection; no ‘magnifying glass’ appears.
Even more curious, this ‘setting’ seems to be permanent until I restart the application. And it affects all UITextFields on that screen and not just the one that I originally tried to edit.
If you want to see it yourself, try the ‘UICatalog’ sample that comes with the iPhone SDK. Click ‘text fields’ and then ‘edit’ and play around with the text boxes.
I’ve done a lot of digging on this but it’s pretty hard to Google for! The best references I’ve found are on Apple’s support board and MacRumors formum (both reference a solution that apparently used to work on iPhone 2.0 but does work not with contemporary versions — I did try).
My feeling that is that this is a bug in the OS, but I thought I’d throw this out to the SO crowd for a second opinion and to see if there are any workarounds. Any ideas?
Following benzado’s suggestion, I tried building my application using the 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 SDKs. I got the same behaviour in all versions. (Actually, something related but not the same broke in 2.2 but that’s probably another question!)
I spent a lot of time on this but I finally think that I have it nailed.
The trick is that the table needs to be editable (i.e., its
editingproperty needs to be set toYES). The good news is that you are now able to move the insertion point. Sometimes the magnifying glass doesn’t appear or follow but your gesture always seems to work.Does this still qualify as a bug? Perhaps. At the very least Apple’s SDK documentation should be updated. I’ve raised a bug report with Apple to cover this (rdar://6462725).