Catch touch events anywhere onscreen in certain views?

Question

I have a menu which I'd like to have automatically hide if it's inactive after a certain amount of time. This menu is composed of a hierarchy of UIViewControllers, which present various different views.

I'm thinking along the lines of running a timer, which invalidates and starts over whenever there's a touch.

Is it possible to catch all touch events in a set of UIViews? Perhaps just keep a boolean lying around and use the main UIWindow to catch touch events?

EDIT:

My app is a kiosk app of sorts, with a main screen and a menu. When the menu is up, I want it to run an auto dismiss timer, which resets after any touch in the entire menu screen. The menu is displayed over the entire screen, modally.

So to clarify, you would want, say, only the menu to remember touches and reset the timer, or the whole view? — CodaFi, Feb 29 '12 at 04:40
Hmm... Without knowing your reasoning, this is a fairly shady design... Shouldn't you allow users to manually dismiss any modal dialogues. But that is beside the point. Is it possible to have watchers hooked up to every method for every UI element in the menu? Maybe they could set something in a *shudder* singleton? — CodaFi, Feb 29 '12 at 05:25
@CodaFi - I want one person to manage the app via a passworded UI. If the admin walks away, it should auto dismiss after a while. — Moshe, Feb 29 '12 at 05:45

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 07:04

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One way to be sure is to subclass UIApplication and override - (void)sendEvent:(UIEvent *)event method, every touch event happening in your app goes through this method and you can check the UIEvent type to see if it's UIEventTypeTouches and reset the timer.

Another way to do this simply involves adding a transparent layer over whole user accesible UI and override hitTest:withEvent:.

answered Feb 29 '12 at 07:04

overboming

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How can I use my UIApplication subclass? – Moshe Apr 03 '12 at 14:06
+1 to `hitTest:withEvent:` - it catches event and can pass it to subviews. You should write this method for root view. – brigadir Nov 15 '13 at 11:55

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 09:32

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You can have an invisible view on top of your modals view controllers, and put have either a gesture recognizer on it which can start a timer, either a

-touchesBegan:withTouches

method, and then send to the .nextResponder the same method.

answered Feb 29 '12 at 09:32

Adrian Ancuta

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Catch touch events anywhere onscreen in certain views?

2 Answers2