iOS UIAlertview with uitextview editable

Question

I\'m searching for a way of putting an UITextView editable inside an UIAlertView.

I know how to put a simple textfield with :

alert.alertViewStyle = UIAl         


        

Answer 1

Unfortunately what you are after isn't possible with a UIAlertView.

Apple don't allow developers to modify the view hierarchy of a UIAlertView or subclass it. Check out the Apple Documentation for UIAlertView. Under the section marked Subclassing note you will find

The UIAlertView class is intended to be used as-is and does not support subclassing. The view hierarchy for this class is private and must not be modified.

Unfortunately though because UIAlertView still has the addSubview: method so it contradicts what Apple are actually telling us but the reason this is still here is because UIAlertView is a subclass of UIView which has this method. So what Apple have done is they have overridden this method so that it does absolutely nothing so when you call [myAlertView addSubview:myView]; will do nothing and no view will be added to the UIAlertView.

So to get the behavior you are after you will need to implement a Custom AlertView (Check out Google search for Custom UIAlertView).

Fortunately in iOS 8 Apple introduced a new class called UIAlertController that allows you to get the behavior that you are after and they have deprecated the UIAlertView class.