Ios – Allowing interaction with a UIView under another UIView

cocoa-touchiosobjective c

Is there a simple way of allowing interaction with a button in a UIView that lies under another UIView – where there are no actual objects from the top UIView on top of the button?

For instance, at the moment I have a UIView (A) with an object at the top and an object at the bottom of the screen and nothing in the middle. This sits on top of another UIView that has buttons in the middle (B). However, I cannot seem to interact with the buttons in the middle of B.

I can see the buttons in B – I've set the background of A to clearColor – but the buttons in B do not seem to receive touches despite the fact that there are no objects from A actually on top of those buttons.

EDIT – I still want to be able to interact with the objects in the top UIView

Surely there is a simple way of doing this?

Best Answer

You should create a UIView subclass for your top view and override the following method:

- (BOOL)pointInside:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    // UIView will be "transparent" for touch events if we return NO
    return (point.y < MIDDLE_Y1 || point.y > MIDDLE_Y2);
}

You may also look at the hitTest:event: method.

Compare method

Either you implement a compare-method for your object:

- (NSComparisonResult)compare:(Person *)otherObject {
    return [self.birthDate compare:otherObject.birthDate];
}

NSArray *sortedArray = [drinkDetails sortedArrayUsingSelector:@selector(compare:)];

NSSortDescriptor (better)

or usually even better:

NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor;
sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"birthDate"
                                           ascending:YES];
NSArray *sortedArray = [drinkDetails sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:@[sortDescriptor]];

You can easily sort by multiple keys by adding more than one to the array. Using custom comparator-methods is possible as well. Have a look at the documentation.

Blocks (shiny!)

There's also the possibility of sorting with a block since Mac OS X 10.6 and iOS 4:

NSArray *sortedArray;
sortedArray = [drinkDetails sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(Person *a, Person *b) {
    return [a.birthDate compare:b.birthDate];
}];

Performance

The -compare: and block-based methods will be quite a bit faster, in general, than using NSSortDescriptor as the latter relies on KVC. The primary advantage of the NSSortDescriptor method is that it provides a way to define your sort order using data, rather than code, which makes it easy to e.g. set things up so users can sort an NSTableView by clicking on the header row.

Ios – How to draw a shadow under a UIView

A by far easier approach is to set some layer attributes of the view on initialization:

self.layer.masksToBounds = NO;
self.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(-15, 20);
self.layer.shadowRadius = 5;
self.layer.shadowOpacity = 0.5;

You need to import QuartzCore.

#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ios – How to sort an NSMutableArray with custom objects in it

Compare method

NSSortDescriptor (better)

Blocks (shiny!)

Performance

Ios – How to draw a shadow under a UIView

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