Question

Okay so I feel like there’s something obvious I’m missing in this question. I’ve used makeFirstResponder throughout my code to move from textField 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc. That seems to work as I want it to, yet when the new view is loaded, I want the cursor to be in textField1, and yet the following code does not place the cursor in textField1 upon load.

- (void) awakeFromNib{
    [[[self view] window] makeFirstResponder:textField1];
}

I also tried setInitialFirstResponder, and that didn’t have any effect either (I don’t even think that would be right.) So, is it because it is in the awakeFromNib method? Can anyone tell me what I’m missing? Thanks in advance.

EDIT – My solution was differed slightly from the accepted answer so I thought I’d post my implementation. Because the view I wanted to set the first responder for was a subview added later (think the second screen of an application wizard), I simply added a setCursorToFirstTextField method:

- (void) setCursorToFirstTextField {
[[[self view] window] makeFirstResponder:textField1];
}

And made sure to call it after I had added the subview to the custom view on the original window.

Answer 1

Yes, you’re right about the problem being the location of the method in awakeFromNib. If you log [self.view window] in your awakeFromNib, you’ll see that it’s NULL. I don’t know how exactly you have things set up, but I’m guessing (if this relates to your WizardController question) that you’re doing an alloc initWithNibName:bundle: in another class to create your view controller and then adding that controller’s view to the view hierarchy. If you throw some logs in there, it will show you that awakeFromNib in the controller class is called after the alloc init, but before the view is added as a subview, so there is no window at that time. The way I got around this problem was to create a setup method in the view controller class (with the makeFirstResponder code in it), and call it from the class where you create the controller after you add it as a subview.

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)aNotification {
    self.wizard = [[WizardController alloc] initWithNibName:@"WizardController" bundle:nil];
    [self.window.contentView addSubview:wizard.view];
    [self.wizard doSetup];
}