How do you keep the cancel button in the search bar enabled when the keyboard is dismissed?

Question

Answer 1

You could do this:

- (void)searchBarCancelButtonClicked:(UISearchBar *)searchBar {
    [self enableCancelButton];
}

- (void)enableCancelButton {
    for (UIView *view in _seachBar.subviews) {
        if ([view isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]]) {
            [(UIButton *)view setEnabled:YES];
        }
    }
}

BUT this is a pretty hackish method and I'm fairly certain it's generally frowned upon by Apple and could potentially lead to the app being rejected. As far as I know, there doesn't seem to be any other way to do what you're trying to do.

Answer 2

You can use the runtime API to access the cancel button.

UIButton *btnCancel = [self.searchBar valueForKey:@"_cancelButton"];
[btnCancel setEnabled:YES];

As far as your question is concerned, there is no way you can enable the cancel button when the keyboard is dismissed, like there is no callback as such.

Answer 3

Here's a simple way:

searchBar.resignFirstResponder()
(searchBar.value(forKey: "_cancelButton") as? UIButton)?.isEnabled = true

Answer 4

Since iOS 7 all the subview of UISearchBar are one level deeper. This should work:

for (UIView *subView in searchBar.subviews) {
    for (UIView *secondLevelSubview in subView.subviews) {
        if ([view isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]]) {
           [(UIButton *)view setEnabled:YES];
        }
}

Still hacky and can easily break in the next iOS version.

Answer 5

Here's a recursive solution that is working for me.

func enableButtons(_ view:UIView) { for subView in view.subviews { enableButtons(subView) } if let buttonView = view as? UIButton { buttonView.isEnabled = true } }