Set inputview for Searchbar - Swift

Question

class TestViewController: UIViewController, UISearchBarDelegate {

  @IBOutlet weak var mySearchBar: UISearchBar!
  var myOwnInputView = UIView(frame: CGRectMake(100,100,50,50))

  overide func viewDidLoad() {
    mySearchBar.delegate = self
    mySearchBar.inputView = myOwnInputView // errors - "Cannot assign to the result of this expression
  }

}

I'm trying to assign a custom input view to my search bar, however based on apple documentation (-sorry could not find link anymore), for UISearchBar it seems to be a read-only value. Looking at this post, it appears that UISearchbar has multiple subviews and I need to get to the UITextField part in order to change the inputview. However, I'm not sufficiently familiar with Obj-C and my attempts to convert the code to Swift have not been successful.

Answer 1

This is the simplest way:

let searchTextField = searchBar.valueForKey("_searchField") as! UITextField
searchTextField.inputView = myOwnInputView

Answer 2

Found out that the textfield is a subview of a subview of UISearchbar.

Code to get to the textfield in swift:

var fakeView: UIView = UIView(frame: CGRectMake(100, 100, 50, 50))
@IBOutlet weak var searchBar: UISearchbar!

override func viewDidLoad() {
  fakeView.backgroundColor = UIColor.redColor()
  var c = 0
  for v in (self.searchBar.subviews[0]).subviews {
    c++
    println("\(c).\(v)") //you should see two views - UISearchBarBackground and UISearcBarTextField
    if let tf = v as? UITextField {
      //do stuff to tf here.
      //in my case, what I want is:
      tf.inputView = fakeView
      break
    }
  }
}}

Result of above code is no keyboard will show up when the searchbar text field is touched, just a red rectangle.

Note - credit goes to Matt Neuburg's "Programming iOS8: Dive Deep into Views, ViewControllers, and Frameworks (ISBN: 978-1491908730). Chapter 8 to be precise.