Change color of disabled bar button item in iOS

Question

I need to display my app's icon in the navigation bar. To do this, I have added it as a right bar button item. I don't want it to be clickable, I just need the icon there, so I set it to disabled. The problem with this is the icon appears grey, instead of green. Is there a way to disable this button but also keep it's original color?

Answer 1

Try this:

let barButtonItem = UIBarButtonItem(title: "Click", style: .Done, target: self, action: #selector(didClick(_:)))
barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.blueColor()], forState: .Normal)
barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.blueColor()], forState: .Disabled)
barButtonItem.enabled = false
navigationItem.setRightBarButtonItem(barButtonItem, animated: false)

Answer 2

try

[button setBackgroundImage:yourIconImage forState:UIControlStateDisabled];
[button setEnabled:NO]

Answer 3

The accepted answer does not work for me (I think it's because I'm using an image, not text).

You can initialize a UIBarButtonItem using a custom view, so in order to solve the issue I subclassed UIBarButtonItem so that it takes a UIButton as an initializer argument.

Here is the code.

class TintableBarButtonItem: UIBarButtonItem {

    private(set) var button: UIButton!

    override var tintColor: UIColor? {
        get { return button.tintColor }
        set { button.tintColor = newValue }
    }

    convenience init(button: UIButton) {
        self.init(customView: button)
        self.button = button
        button.imageView?.contentMode = .scaleAspectFit
        button.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 34, height: 30)            
    }

}

And I used it like this in my ViewController:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    let button = UIButton()
    let image = #imageLiteral(resourceName: "MyIcon").withRenderingMode(.alwaysTemplate)
    button.setImage(image, for: .normal)
    let barButton = TintableBarButtonItem(button: button)
    navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = barButton
}

I got the frame dimensions using the method here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45374012/6167296

You will also have to set the target-actions on the button itself. You can see a similar answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2796488/6167296

Answer 4

myBarButtonItem.setBackgroundImage(myIconImage, forState: .Normal, barMetrics: .Default)
myBarButtonItem.setBackgroundImage(myIconImage, forState: .Disabled, barMetrics: .Default)
myBarButtonItem.enabled = false

Answer 5

To set the color for disabled state across the entire app, you can do the following once in your AppDelegate 's application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: :

let attributes: [String: Any] = [
    NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.red.withAlphaComponent(0.5)
]

UIBarButtonItem.barAppearanceWhenContained(in: UINavigationBar.self)
    .setTitleTextAttributes(attributes, for: UIControlState.disabled)

Answer 6

For swift 4.X

let barButtonItem = UIBarButtonItem(title: "Click", style: .done, target: self, action: #selector(didClick(_:)))

barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSAttributedStringKey.foregroundColor : UIColor.blueColor()], forState: .normal)
barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSAttributedStringKey.foregroundColor : UIColor.blueColor()], forState: .disabled)

barButtonItem.enabled = false
navigationItem.setRightBarButtonItem(barButtonItem, animated: false)

basically NSForegroundColorAttributeName became NSAttributedStringKey.foregroundColor and states went from being caps to lower case .Disabled became .disabled , etc..

Answer 7

SWIFT 5

 let barButtonItem = UIBarButtonItem(title: "Click", style: .done, target: self, action: #selector(didClick(_:)))

 barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.blue], for: .normal)
 barButtonItem.setTitleTextAttributes([NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.blue], for: .disabled)

 barButtonItem.isEnabled = false
 navigationItem.setRightBarButton(barButtonItem, animated: false)