Question

Suppose you have an UITextView and you would like to set the delegate of this UITextView.

First thing is that you put this in your header file:

@interface myViewController : UIViewController <UITextViewDelegate> { ...

Then, if you were using IB, you would click the UITextView, and connect the delegate outlet with File’s Owner. This would allow you to use commands such as - (BOOL)textViewShouldBeginEditing:(UITextView *)aTextView { etc.

Now, suppose you wanted to do this programatically. I found this suggestion on here:

textView.delegate = yourDelegateObject;

But I have no idea what ‘yourDelegateObject’ stands for. In IB, I am connecting with File’s Owner… so in code, it would need to be textView.delegate = File’s Owner. But what is the File’s Owner in this case? myViewController? UIViewController?

I don’t really understand the principle, I suppose. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

As others have stated, set the delegate property of the UITextView. The most common delegate object is self.

To elaborate on “delegate object”: the delegate object is the class (implementing the UITextViewDelegate protocol) that you want the events to respond to. For example, if you use a class instance instead of self, the UITextView will send its events to the implementations of the delegate methods in that class.