Swift 4

(more concise than the other answers)

fileprivate extension UIView {

  var firstViewController: UIViewController? {
    let firstViewController = sequence(first: self, next: { $0.next }).first(where: { $0 is UIViewController })
    return firstViewController as? UIViewController
  }

}

My use case for which I need to access the view first UIViewController: I have an object that wraps around AVPlayer / AVPlayerViewController and I want to provide a simple show(in view: UIView) method that will embed AVPlayerViewController into view. For that, I need to access view's UIViewController.

Two solutions as of Swift 5.2:

• More on the functional side
• No need for the return keyword now

Solution 1:

extension UIView {
    var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
        sequence(first: self) { $0.next }
            .first(where: { $0 is UIViewController })
            .flatMap { $0 as? UIViewController }
    }
}

Solution 2:

extension UIView {
    var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
        sequence(first: self) { $0.next }
            .compactMap{ $0 as? UIViewController }
            .first
    }
}

• This solution requires iterating through each responder first, so may not be the most performant.

Swift 4 version

extension UIView {
var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
    var parentResponder: UIResponder? = self
    while parentResponder != nil {
        parentResponder = parentResponder!.next
        if let viewController = parentResponder as? UIViewController {
            return viewController
        }
    }
    return nil
}

Usage example

 if let parent = self.view.parentViewController{

 }

Swiftier solution

extension UIView {
    var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
        for responder in sequence(first: self, next: { $0.next }) {
            if let viewController = responder as? UIViewController {
                return viewController
            }
        }
        return nil
    }
}

If you aren't going to upload this to the App Store, you can also use a private method of UIView.

@interface UIView(Private)
- (UIViewController *)_viewControllerForAncestor;
@end

// Later in the code
UIViewController *vc = [myView _viewControllerForAncestor];

var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
    let s = sequence(first: self) { $0.next }
    return s.compactMap { $0 as? UIViewController }.first
}

My solution would probably be considered kind of bogus but I had a similar situation as mayoneez (I wanted to switch views in response to a gesture in an EAGLView), and I got the EAGL's view controller this way:

EAGLViewController *vc = ((EAGLAppDelegate*)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate]).viewController;

To get the controller of a given view, one can use UIFirstResponder chain.

customView.target(forAction: Selector("viewDidLoad"), withSender: nil)