Short version: I have a working solution using a UISegmentedControl but I don’t like how it looks. When I use Safari, it “dims” either previous or next when it’s at the beginning or end of the list of input fields. I can’t convince a UISegmentedControl to do that, so how did they do it?
Long version:
I have a UITableView with cells that have text fields. The text fields take numeric inputs (floating point numbers, generally). That means I present the keyboard with keyboardType = UIKeyboardTypeDecimalPad. That also means no return button, so I need a good method to move between cells OTHER THAN touching the cells. I’d like to do it the same way as, say, iOS Safari does it – with a little toolbar that says “previous | next … done.”
I have code that does all of that (sets the textField.inputAccessoryView to be an instance of a UIToolbar with the appropriate buttons), using a UISegmentedControl for the previous and next button. I have that working so that next moves to the next cell and previous moves to the previous cell.
So why am I here? I can’t get the dimmed previous/next behavior seen in iOS Safari to work with a UISegmentedController and I don’t really want to implement all of that myself if I don’t have to (at that point, my CCB will invoke one of the two rules it uses to reject changes: Rule 1) If I don’t think it’s a good idea, then I won’t implement it; Rule 2) If it’s easy, I’ll probably do it).
(I would have posted pictures, but I’m too new to SO – sorry)
When I try to do the same thing it looks and acts like a Safari middle text field, but I can’t seem to get it to look like the Safari version of first or last text field.
I’ve tried enabling, selecting, even changing the bar background color, but none of them seemed to work. The background color seemed to get closest, but I had to have 3 different toolbars based on when it was first, last, or middle, and even then it wasn’t great.
Solved. The issue was that the “enabled” setting of the various segments as set in IB does not make it to the executable. I have to programmatically disable the previous or next segment in the view controller. Once I did this, it now appears as I want it.
When I set up the UISegmentedControl in IB, I set one segment to enabled and the other to disabled (== not enabled). In the debugger I started trolling through the settings of the various segments and found that actually setting the segment to disabled makes it work in the way I wanted.
For example, in the “nextToolbar” that contains a UISegmentedControl that is attached to “nextControl,” only the Next button should be shown as active. That means I have to set the Previous button to disabled. The Previous button is at index 0, so disabling it means to do this somewhere before it’s used (I put this in viewDidLoad:):
Similarly, for the prevControl, where only the Previous button should be active, I use: