When I demo my touch apps to remote teams the people on the other end dont know where I am touching. To remedy this, I have been working on an event intercepting view/window that can display touches over applications. No matter how may variations on nextResponder I call, I am unable to react to the touch and pass it along to the controllers underneath. Specifically scroll views dont react nor do buttons.
Is there a way to take an event, get its position, then pass it along to what ever component would have been responding to it initially (the controller underneath)?
Update:
I am making some progress with a UIView. The new view is always returning NO to pointInside.This works great for when the touch starts, but it doesnt track moves or releases. Is there a strategy to adding gesture recognizers to the touch in order to track its event lifecycle?
Joe
You could try creating your own subclass of UIApplication that overrides sendEvent:. Your implementation should call [super sendEvent:event] as well as process the event as needed.
Update your main.m and pass the name of you custom UIApplication class as the 3rd parameter to the call of UIApplicationMain.
After some more due diligence, I found my oversight. In the layer that was on top and displaying the touches, user interaction needed to be set to false. Once I set that to false, I was able to use that layer for display while catching events on the layers below. The project still isn't done but I am one step closer.
Take care,
Joe
Related
Edit: I am editing my initial question (see below for history) as I am getting new information.
I figured out that when the swipe motion starts from inside the button bounds, we never receive TouchesEnded or TouchesCancelled, only TouchesMoved. However, if I can react on WillEnddragging, it would be great. Is it possible to cancel a gesture on WillEndDragging and also pass this cancel down the children chain?
History:
I am using Xamarin Forms and I have the following issue
I have custom controls part of native scrolling views, like ScrollView or CollectionView, that remain in "clicked" state after the finger enters them but then initiates a scroll gesture.
I had a similar issue on UWP in the past and managed to solve it with the UIElement.PointerCaptureLost event.
Sorry if I am wasting your time on trivial stuff, but I am really stuck and I greatly appreciate your help.
I have tried different approaches suggested, including setting DelaysContentTouches to NO, and playing around with CanCancelContentTouches and overriding TouchesShouldCancelInContentView to always return NO, in a ScrollView custom renderer.
I have had a read of
Allow UIScrollView and its subviews to both respond to a touch
and
UIScrollView sending touches to subviews
Maybe the accepted answer here helps, but I am not sure how to get the tag of my custom view.
What I am expecting is my custom controls to receive the cancelled touch event (or something similar) as happens in both Android and Windows
This was easier than it looked. Solved by adding a UIGestureRecognizerDelegate to my UIGestureRecognizer class and in the delegate I overwrote ShouldRecognizeSimultaneously to return true.
Is there a way to begin a UIPanGestureEvent if the finger is already pressed at the time the object is instantiated?
I have a situation where when a user holds their find on a screen I create a UIView under their finger.
I want them to be able to drag that around and as such I have put a UIPanGestureRecognizer inside the UIView.
Problem is I need to take my finger off and put it back to trigger the UIPanGestureRecognizer to start up. I need it to start from an already pressed state.
Do you know how I can activate a UIPanGesture from an already pressed state i.e. can I get the touch event thats already active at the time of instantiation and pass it along?
You can do it, but the UIPanGestureRecognizer will need to exist already on the view behind the view you create (and you will then have to adjust your calculations based on this; not difficult).
The reason is that, under the circumstances you describe, the touch does not belong to the UIView you create - it belongs to the UIView behind it, the one that the user was originally touching. And given the nature of iOS touch delivery, you can't readily change that. So it will be simpler to let that view, the actual original touch view, do the processing of this touch.
I think Matt's solution is best so I am going to mark it as correct.
However my code structure wasn't going to allow me to cleanly implement it. Compounding the issue was the object listening was listening for a UILongGestureRecognizer.
So my solution was as follows:
Create a callback in my ViewController that would handle the longGestureOverride call
Add a callback to the object listening for the longGesture that would call the longGestureOverride callback and pass along the point
Manually move the object based on the point passed back
If the user lifts their finger, I disable the longGestureOverride callback, and begin using the UIPanGesture inside the new object
I have a situation where I apply an effect to a UIView when a touch begins and reverse that effect when that touch ends. So basically I am tracking touchesbegan, touchesEnded and touchesCancelled methods of UIView.
But the problem is that when the view goes out of the screen, i.e. when it or one of its parents gets removed from superview, it does not get any more touch events. Is there any way to give this "last" touchesended event to the view? Maybe if the UIView gets notified about being invisible, I can also use this event for that purpose.
Ok I am going to move the answers in comments to original question to make a good summary of important points.
The reason I am tracking touch events is that I want to apply some
nice effects such as glowing on touch start and remove those effects
on touch ending.
The reason why I can not simulate touchesEnded on removing those
views is that I do not directly remove them. Instead I remove one of
the ancestor views of them. I can not keep track of ancestor views
all the way to UIWindow, it is technically impossible I think.
Instead, framework should provide this to as an event I think.
I solved my problem by overriding -(void)willMoveToWindow:(UIWindow *)newWindow method and checking if newWindow is nil.
Imagine a view with, say, 4 subviews, next to each other but non overlapping.
Let's call them view#1 ... view#4
All 5 such views are my own UIView subclasses (yes, I've read: Event Handling as well as iOS Event Guide and this SO question and this one, not answered yet)
When the user touches one of them, UIKit "hiTests" it and delivers subsequent events to that view: view#1
Even when the finger goes outside view#1, over say view#3.
Even if this "drag" is now over view#3, view#1 still receives touchesMoved, but view#3 receives nothing.
I want view#3 to start replying to the touches. Maybe with a "touchedEntered" of my own, together with possibly a "touchesExited" on view#1.
How would I go about this?
I can see two approaches.
side step the problem and do all the touch handling in the parent
view whenever I detect a touchesMoved outside of view#1 bounds or,
transfer to the parent view telling it to "redispatch". Not very
clear how such redispatching would work, though.
For solution #2 where I am getting confused is not about the forwarding per se, but how to find the UIVIew I want to forward to. I can obviously loop through the parent subviews until I find one whose bounds/frame contain the touch, but I am wondering if I am missing something, that Apple would have already provided but I cannot relate to this problem.
Any idea?
I have done this, but I used CALayers instead of sub-UIViews. That way, there is no worries about the subviews catching/redispatching events to the parent UIView. You might not be able to do that, but it does simplify things. My solution tended to use CGRectContainsPoint() a lot.
You may want to read Event Handling again, as it comes pretty close to answering your question:
A touch object...is associated with its hit-test view for its
lifetime, even if the touch represented by the object subsequently
moves outside the view.
Given that, if you want to accomplish your goal of having different views react to the user's finger crossing over them, and if you want to do it within the touch-handling mechanism provided by UIView, you should go with your first approach: have the parent view handle the touch. The parent can use -hitTest:withEvent: or -pointInside:withEvent: as it's tracking a touch to determine if the touch is in one of the subviews, and if so can send an appropriate message.
I'm trying to handle touch events with touchesBegan in an overlay to a parent UIView but also allow the touch input to pass through to sibling UIViews underneath. I expected there would be some straight-forward way to process a touch event and then say "now send it to the next responder as if this one didn't exist", but all I can find is the nextResponder method which appears to be giving back the parent to my overlay view. That parent is then not really passing it onto the next sibling of that overlay view so I'm stuck uncertain how to do what seems like a simple task that is usually accomplished with a touch callback that gets a True or False return value to tell it whether to keep processing down the widget hierarchy.
Am I missing something obvious?
Late answer, but I think you would be better off overriding hitTest:withEvent: instead of touchesBegan. It seems to me that touchesBegan is a pretty "high-level" method that is there to just do a simple thing, so you cannot alter at that level if the event if propagated further. The right place to do that is hitTest:withEvent:.
Also have a look at this S.O. answer for more details about this point.
I understand the desired behavior you're looking for Joey - I haven't found something in the API that supports this automatic messaging-up-the-chain behavior with sibling views.
What I originally wrote below was with respect to just informing a parent UIView about a touch. This still applies, but I believe you need to take it a step further and have the parent UIView use the hit testing technique that Sergio described on each of it's subviews that are siblings to the overlay, and have the parent UIView manually invoke a "do something" method on each of it's subviews that pass the hit test. Each of those sibling views can return a BOOL value on whether to abort informing other siblings or continue the chain.
If you find yourself using this pattern a lot, consider adding a category method on UIView that encapsulates the hit testing and asking views to perform a selector.
My Original Answer
With a little bit of manual work, you can wire this together yourself. I've had to do this, and it worked for me, because I had an oft-repeated use case (an overlay view on a button), where it made sense to create some custom classes. If your situation is similar, one of these techniques will suffice.
Option 1:
If the overlay doesn't need to do anything but look pretty, have it opt out of touch handling completely with userInteractionEnabled = NO. This will make it so that the touch event goes to it's parent UIView (the one it is an overlay to).
Option 2:
Have the overlay absorb the touch event (as it would by default), and then invoke a method on the parent UIView indicating that a touch or certain gesture was recognized, and here's what it is. This way, the UIView behind the overlay still gets to act on the touch recognition, even if someone else did the interception.
With Option 2, it's more a fit for simple UIControlEvent types, like UIControlEventTouchDown and UIControlEventTouchUpInside. In my case (a custom UIButton subclass with a custom overlay view on top of it), I'll wire touch down and touch up events on the button to two separate methods. These fire if a touch down or touch up inside event occurs on the button itself. But, they are also hooks I can invoke from the overlay view if I need to simulate that a button press occurred.
Depending on your needs, you could have a known protocol between the overlay and it's parent UIView or just have the overlay test the UIView informally, with a respondsToSelector: check before invoking performSelector: on it with the custom method you want called that would have fired automatically if the UIView wasn't covered by an overlay.