Siri Dictation Bypasses UITextView:shouldChangeTextInRange Delegate

Question

I use (BOOL)textView:(UITextView *)textView shouldChangeTextInRange:(NSRange)range replacementText:(NSString *) to perform real-time regex validation on every character input into a UITextView.

This works well and even handles pasted text that might contain invalid characters.

But Siri doesn't seem to care for such things and dumps its dictation straight into (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)theTextView, bypassing the shouldChangeTextInRange delegate and avoiding validation checks.

This seems like a security flaw to me and breaks the API flow that every other input channel follows.

Any thoughts as to how I can get Siri Dictation to comply with calling shouldChangeTextInRange ?

Corpulence

Dunno, but it sounds like a good bug to file. – Czerny

I agree. Sounds like you should file a radar. – Zedoary

Bug reported to Apple. Let's see what happens. – Corpulence

I see why you expect textView:shouldChangeTextInRange: to be fired, but, as a current solution, you can look into UITextInput protocol, it has several dictation-related delegates. – Honeybunch

Would love to see some updates on this question. Like how to use UITextInput, and a link to the radar so we can track the progress and up-vote it (if Apple has that concept). For now I catch textViewDidChange and just truncate the text if too long (the text from the end of the field, since I have no way to know where/what was added at that point). Not ideal. – Omeara

@SebastianDwornik, Any update on this? – Trondheim

From Apple: Engineering has determined that your bug report (18866525) is a duplicate of another issue (18306033) and will be closed. – Corpulence

Answer 1

I think this is the answer....if:

 - (BOOL)textView:(UITextView *)textView shouldChangeTextInRange:(NSRange)range replacementText:(NSString *)text

is called then it's a user input. So put a BOOL in there to remember if the 'shouldChange' was checked.

then, microphone input will call:

-(void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)textView

check your BOOL in here and if it's NO, then it's a microphone input.

(make the BOOL = NO at the end of textViewDidChange:)

That works great for me.

Ike

Hard to understand, poor wording, and most important, didn't work. Down-voted too. – Trondheim

that's the solution by the way if you don't want to dig into dictation delegates of UITextInput – Photoconduction