Adding default text to UITextView - ios

Question

I was wondering how to display a default prompt in a UITextView. If I wanted the user to type a description in a text view, the UITextView could have "description" printed in it, and when the user starts to type, it disappears.

Answer 1

For UITextField, there is the placeholderText property, which will display a grayed out text that is removed once the user starts typing.
For UITextView, you can use a custom implementation, such as SZTextView, which implements a similar functionality of a placeholder text.

Answer 2

It wont be a wise idea to use a third party uitextview for placeholder property.
Follow these steps and you will achieve what you need-
set- textview.textcolor=[uicolor greycolor];
textview.text=#"Your initial placeholder text";
Now in -textViewShouldBeginEditing write these lines of codes-
if(textview.color==[uicolor greycolor]){
textview.color=[uicolor blackcolor];
textview.text=#"";
}
Cheers.

Answer 3

The below solution from #svmrajesh isn't complete. You still need to implement an auto-delete functionality so the default text deletes as soon as the user selects the textView.
In my implementation I set the text in the UITextView to lightGrayColor initially so that it looks like default text
[textView setTextColor:[UIColor lightGrayColor]];
Then in the header file I implement the UITextViewDelegate.
#interface YourViewController <UITextViewDelegate>
Then I set the UITextView delegate to self.
[textView setDelegate:self];
Then simply I implement the following delegate method which is fired when the user selects the textView to start typing in their text. The first thing it does is to check if the text color is still set to lightGray.
If it is then the default text is still being displayed, so it is deleted and the textColor is set to black. This simple solution works well for me.
-(void)textViewDidBeginEditing:(UITextView *)textView
{
if(textView.textColor == [UIColor lightGrayColor])
{
textView.textColor = [UIColor blackColor];
textView.text = #"";
}
}

Answer 4

Try this....
For UITextView :
UITextView *myUITextView = [[UITextView alloc] init];
myUITextView.delegate = self;
myUITextView.text = #"placeholder text here...";
For UITextField :
UITextField *textField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 150, 200)];
textField.placeholderText = #"Enter your text here";
[self.view addSubview textField];