How to detect a touch in a subview that was dragged there (or fastest way to get which subview is underneath a tap in its superview) - ios

Question

I've got a Super View, and its got a bunch of subviews. I'd like a user to be able to drag their finger inside the super view and when they drag over the subviews, that subview changes.
I need this to be very efficient, because changes can happen really fast.
So far what i've tried, is in the super view I can get the touch events from touchesBegan:withEvent: and touchesMoved:withEvent: These two combined give me all the touches I need. On each call of these methods, I have to iterate through all of the subviews and test like so
for (UIView *view in self.subviews) {
if (CGRectContainsPoint(view.frame, touchPoint) {
return view;
}
}
Then change that view however I want to. Problem is, from my benchmarking this process is just two slow.
My immediate thought is to have the subview's themselves detect the touch and then just post a notification or something like that when they are tapped. This way I don't have to iterate through them all inside the superview every freaking touch event.
The problem I am encountering with this, is that I haven't found a way to get the subviews themselves to detect that they are touched when they are just dragged over and the touch actually originated on a different UIView.
I'm open to any suggestions that either speed up the first process, or have a different way to accomplish this.

Answer 1

Since your subviews are on a Grid and if they are equally sized, you should be able to calculate the highlighted one directly. You just need to store their references on creation in a 2D array, for performance I suggest to use a c-array.
int x = touchPoint.x/viewWidth;
int y = touchPoint.y/viewHeight;
return views[x][y];
Depending on your Layout, some border margins or spacings between the views should be taken into account.
This way you do not need to iterate the subviews array and you do not need to perform all these CGRectContainsPoint calculations.

Answer 2

Should be easy:
MyViewController.h
#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#interface MyViewController : UIViewController
#end
MyViewController.m
#import "MyViewController.h"
#define SIDE_LENGTH 60
#define NUM_SQUARES 15
#implementation MyViewController
{
UIView *_selectedView;
}
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
[self populateView];
}
- (void)populateView
{
for (int i = 0; i < 15; ++i)
{
CGRect frame = CGRectMake(drand48() * self.view.frame.size.width - SIDE_LENGTH,
drand48() *self.view.frame.size.height - SIDE_LENGTH,
SIDE_LENGTH,
SIDE_LENGTH);
UIView *view = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:drand48()
green:drand48()
blue:drand48()
alpha:1.0f];
view.layer.cornerRadius = SIDE_LENGTH / 2.0f; // cuz circles r pretty
[self.view addSubview:view];
}
}
- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.view];
for (UIView *view in self.view.subviews)
{
if (CGRectContainsPoint(view.frame, location)) {
_selectedView = view;
break;
}
}
}
- (void)touchesMoved:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.view];
_selectedView.center = location;
}
- (void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.view];
_selectedView.center = location;
}
#end
Of course, for you, just get rid of the populateView method. I'm just using it to demonstrate how this works as a drop-in class.
If you're looking for speed, then subclass UIView and do this:
MyView.h
#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#class MyView;
#interface MyView : UIView
#end
MyView.m
#implementation MyView
- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.superview];
self.center = location;
}
- (void)touchesMoved:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.superview];
self.center = location;
}
- (void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self.superview];
self.center = location;
}
#end
Then MyViewController.m becomes much simpler and faster:
#import "MyViewController.h"
#import "MyView.h"
#define SIDE_LENGTH 60
#define NUM_SQUARES 15
#implementation MyViewController
{
UIView *_selectedView;
}
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
[self populateView];
}
- (void)populateView
{
for (int i = 0; i < 15; ++i)
{
CGRect frame = CGRectMake(drand48() * self.view.frame.size.width - SIDE_LENGTH,
drand48() *self.view.frame.size.height - SIDE_LENGTH,
SIDE_LENGTH,
SIDE_LENGTH);
MyView *view = [[MyView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:drand48()
green:drand48()
blue:drand48()
alpha:1.0f];
view.layer.cornerRadius = SIDE_LENGTH / 2.0f;
[self.view addSubview:view];
}
}
#end