Handling touches inside UIWebview

Question

I have created a subclass of UIWebView , and have implemented the touchesBegan, touchesMoved and touchesEnded methods.

Answer 1

Handling gestures on a UIWebView is discussed in this Apple Developer forum thread.

Using the info given there, there will be no need for an extra view in most or all cases, and as mentioned here before, overriding UIWebView is not the way to go.

Copypaste of the most important post in the thread:

This is a known issue. The UIWebView has its own UITapGestureRecognizers, and they're on a private subview of the UIWebView itself. UIGestureRecognizer precedence defines that gestures attached to views deeper in the view hierarchy will exclude ones on superviews, so the web view's tap gestures will always win over yours.

If it's okay in your case to allow your tap to happen along with the web view's normal tap your best solution would be to implement the UIGestureRecognizerDelegate method gestureRecognizer:shouldRecognizeSimultaneouslyWithGestureRecognizer and return YES for other tap gestures. This way you'll get your tap handler called, and the web view will still get its called.

If you need to be the only one handling the tap you'll have to subclass UITapGestureRecognizer so you can use the one-way overrides in UIGestureRecognizerSubclass.h, an you can then return NO from canBePreventedByGestureRecognizer: when asked if the web view's tap gesture recognizer can prevent yours.

In any case, we know about this and hope to make it easier in the future.