Multiline UITextView in UIScrollView selection not working - ios

Question

I have a multiline UITextView that sits in a UIScrollView. It's configured to be editable and selectable, so long pressing brings up the standard Select/Select All, etc menu. If I tap Select All I can only resize the selection on the first line. Once the selection changes to not include the first line the selection handles no longer respond to touch input.
If I select a single word on the first line, the left selection handle functions normally, but the right handle doesn't receive touch input.
Any ideas what might be causing this? This is very strange and I can't really figure out what's going on. I'm not overriding any gestures (that I can tell, anyway).

Answer 1

Ah, figured it out. The text view was inside another view, as expected, but I had custom hit detection on the parent view. In -hitTest:withEvent: in the case where I was in editing mode I was returning the text view itself instead of calling hitTest on the text view so it could determine if the selection view should be returned.
So, long story long, if you have a text view inside another view and are doing custom hit detection, make sure to call -hitTest:withEvent: on the UITextView as necessary so you don't lose selection capabilities.
- (UIView *)hitTest:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
// a text box is tappable if:
// a) obviously, the tap point is inside self
// b) if current mode is unselected, check to see if a label was tapped. Because the label stretches the width of
// the text box for layout purposes, check to see if the tap point lays inside with intrinsic content size of the
// label. If not, pass the tap to the next subview
// c) If the mode is already selected, ask super to return the appropriate view.
if (!self.userInteractionEnabled || self.hidden || self.alpha <= 0.01) {
return nil;
}
CGRect touchRect = self.bounds;
if (self.currentMode == TextBoxModeSelected) {
touchRect = CGRectInset(self.bounds, -22, -22);
}
if (CGRectContainsPoint(touchRect, point)) {
if (self.currentMode == TextBoxModeUnselected) {
return [self.readOnlyTextView hitTest:point withEvent:event];
}
else if (self.currentMode == TextBoxModeSelected) {
return self;
}
else if (self.currentMode == TextBoxModeEdit) {
CGPoint pointInTextView = [self.editingTextView convertPoint:point fromView:self];
if ([self.editingTextView pointInside:pointInTextView withEvent:event]) {
// PREVIOUSLY I WAS RETURNING self.editingTextView HERE
// self.contentView IS THE TEXT VIEW'S PARENT. LET IT DETERMINE THE
// SUBVIEW THAT'S BEING TAPPED. IN THE CASE OF SELECTION, IT'S UITextRangeView
return [self.contentView hitTest:point withEvent:event];
}
}
}
return nil;
}