Disable Magnifying Glass in UITextField

Question

Is there a way to prevent the user from moving the cursor in a UITextField? I'd like it to stay at the end of the string.

Intrigante

related: #16419595 – Piper

Answer 1

There's no way to prevent them from moving the cursor. You can, however, prevent them from editing the text except at the end by implementing the

– textField:shouldChangeCharactersInRange:replacementString:

method in your text field's delegate.

Edit: you can also set userInteractionEnabled to NO so that the user can't tap the field. Call becomeFirstResponder manually so that the field gets focus since the user can't tap to focus.

Puddling

That is what I have now but it's kinda wonky for the user when they move the cursor and then type a key and the characters append to the end of the string. Not ideal...but not fatal. Looking for an easy way to disable touches on the UITextField. May go the subclass route if that's my only option. – Intrigante

May I ask what you're trying to accomplish? Why not allow placing the cursor? But yeah, it seems just setting userInteractionEnabled=NO would be the best fix. – Puddling

Answer 2

This is an old question, but I was looking for an answer to the same question, and found a solution.

It is actually quite simple to prevent the user from moving the cursor. Just subclass UITextField and provide the following implementation of caretRectForPosition:

- (CGRect)caretRectForPosition:(UITextPosition *)position
{
    return [super caretRectForPosition:self.endOfDocument];
}

Rivkarivkah

I'd just like to add that while this does indeed prevent the caret from moving, it however does not disable the magnifying glass (at least not in iOS 7). The title and question are both asking for different things. – Presume

Answer 3

NO SUBCLASS needed.

You Could use UITextFieldDelegate. It will make disable magnifying glass & text selection.

- (BOOL)textFieldShouldBeginEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
    textField.userInteractionEnabled = NO;
    return YES;
}

- (void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
    textField.userInteractionEnabled = YES;
}

NB: This is just a bypass.

Prefigure

Works in Swift. This code disables all UIResponderStandardEditActions like copying, pasting etc. – Islington

Answer 4

Firstly need to say that now there is no way to disable magnifying glass directly but you can use some tricks:

To disable UITextField caret you can subclass UITextField and override method

 override func caretRect(for position: UITextPosition) -> CGRect {
        .null
 }

This will hide the caret but magnifying glas will still be displayed when long tap on UITextField. Next you need to override

override func gestureRecognizerShouldBegin(_ gestureRecognizer: UIGestureRecognizer) -> Bool {
        return gestureRecognizer as? UILongPressGestureRecognizer == nil
    }

In function you need to catch UILongPressGestureRecognizer and return false. Be sure that there is no other actions handles by this gesture. It may also break off any other options, but if you make your own custom input component, you may not need them.

Buxtehude

Answer 5

I'd suggest to check the gestureRecognizers property.

You will find a lot of them in the array and might want to either remove them all or to find the ones that triggers the event you want to intercept and remove/replace it.

I used it to remove copy/paste and magnifying glass functionalities from an UITextField

Jotter

Xcode tells me that UITextField does "not have an outlet collection" for gesture recognizers. – Pamilapammi

Answer 6

I haven't check if you can disable the magnifying glass, but the recommended way to selectively disable editing behavior in a UIResponder (and thus a UITextField) is to implement canPerformAction:withSender of UIResponder.

See UIResponder documentation.

Maybe if you return "NO" for the select and selectAll action you can disable it.

Another, more brutal, way is to intercept any touch event and reset the cursor to the end.

Charlettecharley

select/selectAll only affect the menu, not the magnifying glass – Lavin