UITextfield's clear button hides keyboard when its inside UIScrollView

Question

I have a textfield inside a UIScrollView and i want to show a clear button when user starts editing. Also i need to hide keyboard when user taps the background of UIScrollview (but not the textfield). Displaying that clear button isn't a problem, the problem is that when clear button is tapped keyboard gets hidden and the text field doesn't get cleared. Obviously the problem is with the gesture recognizer, because method dealing with this gets fired when the clear button is clicked (but it's not fired when the text field is tapped). Here's my code :

    //adding gesture recognizer so i can hide keyboard when user taps scrollview
    - (void) textFieldDidBeginEditing:(UITextField *)textField
    {
        if (self.tapOutside == nil) self.tapOutside = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(textFieldTouchOutSide:)];

        [self.scrollView addGestureRecognizer:self.tapOutside];
    }

    //This hides keyboard BUT IS ALSO CALLED WHEN CLEAR BUTTON IS TAPPED
    - (void)textFieldTouchOutSide:(id)sender
    {
        [self.textfield resignFirstResponder];
    }

    //NEVER GETS CALLED
    - (BOOL) textFieldShouldClear:(UITextField *)textField {
        return YES;
    }

Any ideas how to solve this? Maybe better way to add gesture recognizer? I can't think of no elegant solution ... Thanks a lot in advance...

Answer 1

I had the same problem and solved it implementing the following method:

- (BOOL)gestureRecognizer:(UIGestureRecognizer *)gestureRecognizer shouldReceiveTouch:(UITouch *)touch {
    // Disallow recognition of gestures in unwanted elements
    if ([touch.view isMemberOfClass:[UIButton class]]) { // The "clear text" icon is a UIButton
        return NO;
    }
    return YES;
}

Don't forget to conform to the "UIGestureRecognizerDelegate" protocol and set the delegate (using your vars):

self.tapOutside.delegate = self;

Cheers

Answer 2

I was just having this issue and this solution worked, however if you do have other buttons on the view that you allow the user to tap while filling out the form you can do the following:

-(BOOL)gestureRecognizer:(UIGestureRecognizer *)gestureRecognizer shouldReceiveTouch:(UITouch *)touch {
// Disallow recognition of gestures in unwanted elements
if ([touch.view isMemberOfClass:[UIButton class]] && [touch.view.superview isMemberOfClass:[UITextField class]]) { 

    // The "clear text" icon is a UIButton
    return NO;
}
return YES;
}

This will narrow down the case to only return No if the button is a subview of a UITextField, as is the case with the clear button, but still hide the keyboard if they touch a normal button that would normally execute your gesture code.