How do I give a UITextView focus programmatically?

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So I want to bring in a modal view controller that has a UITextView in it and I want the keyboard to automatically popup and the UITextView have focus.

I found a way to accomplish this by doing the following:

textView.editable = YES;
textView.editable = NO;

This just seems hacky to me, is there another way?

6 Answers

Since UITextView inherits from UIResponder (indirectly, it actually inherits from UIScrollView, which inherits from UIView which then inherits from UIResponder) you can call the -becomeFirstResponder method on your text field, which will cause it to become the first responder and begin editing:

[textView becomeFirstResponder];

That does seem somewhat hackish.

The Cocoa Touch terminology for 'having focus' is 'first responder' and UITextViews will display their keyboards when they are the first responder. I can think of several techniques to make the UITextView become the first responder, but the easiest is probably in your view controller's viewWillAppear or viewDidAppear methods:

- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated
{

    [myTextView becomeFirstResponder];

    [super viewWillAppear:animated];
}
[textView becomeFirstResponder];

When you want the focus to be that particular TextView on loading a ViewController, you can place the textView.becomeFirstResponder() in the ViewDidLoad overrode func as below:

 override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

textView.becomeFirstResponder()

}

I find this works without any errors

On Xamarin Forms Custom Render:

   protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<Entry> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged(e);

        if (Control != null)
        {
            Control.BecomeFirstResponder();
        }
    }
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