How to access the view such as imageview and label in SearchBar Reference?

Question

I am trying to customize the SearchBar using the SearchBar reference as declared bellow

@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet UISearchBar *searchRef;

Then, i am trying to access the UIImage Reference and UISearchBarTextFieldLabel as shown in picture

I am printing the reference of the subviews using following code

NSLog(@"%@",self.searchRef.subviews[0].subviews[1].subviews);

but not getting the result as expected. I want the UIImage ref as well as UISearchBarTextFieldLabel. How can i do that?

Answer 1

You can reach the imageView from searchbar like this than you can reach the uiimage

Objective-C

UITextField *textFieldInsideSearchBar = [self.searhBar valueForKey:@"searchField"];
UIImageView *imageView = (UIImageView *) textFieldInsideSearchBar.leftView;

Swift 3 and Swift 4

let textFieldInsideSearchBar = searchBar.value(forKey: "searchField") as? UITextField
let imageView = textFieldInsideSearchBar?.leftView as! UIImageView

Answer 2

If you have a reference to the text field, you can cast it as UITextField and then access its leftView and rightView properties. Usually, the leftView is the magnifying glass UIImageView.

UITextField *textField = (UITextField *)self.searchRef.subviews[0].subviews[1];

// Change the search image.
if ([textField.leftView isKindOfClass:[UIImageView class]]) {

    UIImageView *searchImageView = (UIImageView *)textField.leftView;

    // Do something with the image view here...
}

As a side note, it's not recommended to assume that UISearchBar's views will always be laid out this way. For example, Apple may decide in future to change the view hierarchy, which could cause your code to fail or crash completely.

If you must do this, it would be safer to recursively search each view's subviews until you find what you're looking for, instead of hard-coding array indices.