UITextField in UIAlertController (border, backgroundColor) - ios

Question

Here is a screenshot of a UIAlertController. I was just playing around custom fonts and textfield properties but I was unable to accomplish the following:
clear background of the UITextField
no ugly border (black box) as shown below
As I dived more into the code and iOS runtime headers, I was able to modify border and background color but the above issue still remains as those properties belong to a container UITextView. Changing background to clearColor doesn't help.
Has anybody ever played around with this? Not sure if I would ever take my app into production with such ugly text fields.
EDIT (May 13, 15) The answer below by Rory McKinnel is tested for iOS 8 - 8.3 and works just fine. The result is below:

Answer 1

Had some fun with this. The following seems to work. Obviously judging by what was required, it has no future proofing and is a patch away from not working.
I figured this out by walking the view hierarchy in the debugger, from which I noticed a UIVisualEffectView. Removing that seems to give you what you want along with setting the containing view to a clear background. Without removing the visual effect, a clear background shows what is behind the alert view itself for some reason.
UIAlertController *alertController =
[UIAlertController alertControllerWithTitle:#"Its Not Pretty!"
message:#"Some times things get ugly!"
preferredStyle:UIAlertControllerStyleAlert];
[alertController addTextFieldWithConfigurationHandler:^(UITextField *textField){
textField.text = #"Text: No border and clear 8^)";
}];
[self presentViewController:alertController animated:TRUE completion:^{
}];
for (UIView* textfield in alertController.textfields) {
UIView *container = textField.superview;
UIView *effectView = container.superview.subviews[0];
if (effectView && [effectView class] == [UIVisualEffectView class]){
container.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
[effectView removeFromSuperview];
}
}

Answer 2

here is the important part in swift:
for textfield: UIView in alertController.textfields {
var container: UIView = textField.superview
var effectView: UIView = container.superview.subviews[0]
container.backgroundColor = UIColor.clearColor()
effectView.removeFromSuperview()
}

Answer 3

Swift 3 clear version
alertController.textFields?.forEach {
$0.superview?.backgroundColor = .clear
$0.superview?.superview?.subviews[0].removeFromSuperview()
}

Answer 4

You can try this.
As you need only clear color to textfield of your alertview.
simply add lines of code after your alertview is created.
UITextField *textField = [alertView textFieldAtIndex:0];
textField.backgroundColor=[UIColor clearColor];
textField.superview.backgroundColor=[UIColor clearColor];
EDIT
for alertviewCoontroller you can add
[alert addTextFieldWithConfigurationHandler:^(UITextField *textField) {
textField.backgroundColor=[UIColor clearColor];
textField.superview.backgroundColor=[UIColor clearColor];
}];
Thanks, revert if any confusion.

Answer 5

You can change the border and background color like this:
let subview = alertController!.view.subviews.first! as UIView
let alertContentView = subview.subviews.first! as UIView
alertContentView.backgroundColor = UIColor.lightGrayColor()
alertContentView.layer.cornerRadius = 10;
alertContentView.layer.borderWidth = 2;

Answer 6

Swift 2.0 version:
for textField in alert.textFields! {
if let container = textField.superview, let effectView = container.superview?.subviews.first where effectView is UIVisualEffectView {
container.backgroundColor = UIColor.clearColor()
effectView.removeFromSuperview()
}
}

Answer 7

To address the situation as discussed in #Rory McKinnel and #Matthew where the superview are NULL and address modifying presented view:
extension UIAlertController {
override open func viewWillAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
super.viewWillAppear(animated)
self.textFields?.forEach {
$0.superview?.backgroundColor = .color
$0.superview?.superview?.subviews[0].removeFromSuperview()
}
}
}

Answer 8

This is very hacky, so examine it well before using (tested on iOS 8.3):
UIAlertController* alert = [UIAlertController alertControllerWithTitle:#"My Alert"
message:#"This is an alert."
preferredStyle:UIAlertControllerStyleAlert];
[alert addTextFieldWithConfigurationHandler:^(UITextField *textField) {
textField.placeholder = #"This is my placeholder";
textField.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:246.0/255.0 green:246.0/255.0 blue:246.0/255.0 alpha:1.0]; // You can change it to whatever color you want
[textField superview].backgroundColor = textField.backgroundColor;
[[textField superview] superview].backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
}];