Leaving inputAccessoryView visible after keyboard is dismissed iOS8?

Question

I want to make behavior like messaging app. I have been browsing Stack Overflow for solutions for this, and indeed there are plenty:

Leaving inputAccessoryView visible after keyboard is dismissed

This was the one that I found. But it seems things are a little different in iOS8. If I do the same thing in new iOS8 sdk, i get error:

'UIViewControllerHierarchyInconsistency', reason: 'child view controller:<UICompatibilityInputViewController: 0x7fdcb3441b10> should have parent view controller:<ViewController: 0x7fdcb3b1e9f0> but requested parent is:<UIInputWindowController: 0x7fdcb684c000>'

In order to test this more I made a sample project, just one controller with view on the bottom:

Outlet is connected to bottom view, that only has UITextField on it. Am I missing something and how do i get the desired behvior?

Abramabramo

Have you tried it initializing the UIView in code, and making a strong reference to it? – Glissando

Yes, the result is the same – Abramabramo

Very weird. Ok, last question – which Xcode version are you using? Including build numbers and everything? – Glissando

Did you try my answer? If it worked, accept it as the right answer. – Ppi

Answer 1

iOS8 has a retain cycle with the inputAccessoryView. Here's a good post that seems to have a good workaround:

http://derpturkey.com/uitextfield-docked-like-ios-messenger/

Backwater

The one big problem with using that workaround, which implements the inputAccessoryView on the view instead of the view controller is that the animation of the accessory view is not coordinated with the view when pushing the view controller on a navigation stack. Instead of being animated with the view controller's view and sliding with it, the accessory view animates up from the bottom while the view controller view slides in from the right. – Fausta

Answer 2

You are adding the someView to multiple superViews, which leads to inconsistent hierarchies (which it is telling you).

When the keyboard gets activated, it calls the inputAccessoryView() method to see if it needs to stick anything on top of the keyboard, and adds that to its own superView. But you already added it to the view through your storyboard.

Now there are 2 ways you can solve this:

1. Make a .xib with your view and return that one in your inputAccessoryView(), not adding it to any superview yourself (the keyboard will.

2. Or make it completely in code using NSLayoutConstraint.

You can add the following code to your ViewController which will persist the view even when the keyboard is hidden.

override func canBecomeFirstResponder() -> Bool {
    return true
}

Look at this GitHub repo for an example.

Ppi