iOS - forward all touches through a view

I needed to pass touches through a UIStackView. A UIView inside was transparent, but the UIStackView consumed all touches. This worked for me:

class PassThrouStackView: UIStackView {

    override func hitTest(_ point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> UIView? {
        let view = super.hitTest(point, with: event)
        if view == self {
            return nil
        }
        return view
    }
}

All arrangedSubviews still receive touches, but touches on the UIStackView itself went through to the view below (for me a mapView).

If the view you want to forward the touches to doesn't happen to be a subview / superview, you can set up a custom property in your UIView subclass like so:

@interface SomeViewSubclass : UIView {

    id forwardableTouchee;

}
@property (retain) id forwardableTouchee;

Make sure to synthesize it in your .m:

@synthesize forwardableTouchee;

And then include the following in any of your UIResponder methods such as:

- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {

    [self.forwardableTouchee touchesBegan:touches withEvent:event];

}

Wherever you instantiate your UIView, set the forwardableTouchee property to whatever view you'd like the events to be forwarded to:

    SomeViewSubclass *view = [[[SomeViewSubclass alloc] initWithFrame:someRect] autorelease];
    view.forwardableTouchee = someOtherView;

In Swift 5

class ThroughView: UIView {
    override func point(inside point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> Bool {
        guard let slideView = subviews.first else {
            return false
        }

        return slideView.hitTest(convert(point, to: slideView), with: event) != nil
    }
}

Looks like even thou its quite a lot of answers here, there is no one clean in swift that I needed. So I took answer from @fresidue here and converted it to swift as it's what now mostly developers want to use here.

It solved my problem where I have some transparent toolbar with button but I want toolbar to be invisible to user and touch events should go through.

isUserInteractionEnabled = false as some stated is not an option based on my testing.

 override func point(inside point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> Bool {
    for subview in subviews {
        if subview.hitTest(convert(point, to: subview), with: event) != nil {
            return true
        }
    }
    return false
}

I had couple of labels inside StackView and I didn't have much success with the solutions above, instead I solved my problem using below code:

    let item = ResponsiveLabel()

    // Configure label

    stackView.addArrangedSubview(item)

Subclassing UIStackView:

class PassThrouStackView:UIStackView{
    override func hitTest(_ point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> UIView? {
        for subview in self.arrangedSubviews {
            let convertedPoint = convert(point, to: subview)
            let labelPoint = subview.point(inside: convertedPoint, with: event)
            if (labelPoint){
                return subview
            }

        }
        return nil
    }

}

Then you could do something like:

class ResponsiveLabel:UILabel{
    override func touchesBegan(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent?) {
        // Respond to touch
    }
}

The situation I was trying to do was build a control panel using controls inside nested UIStackView’s. Some of the controls had UITextField’s others with UIButton’s. Also, there were labels to identify the controls. What I wanted to do was put a big “invisible” button behind the control panel so that if a user tapped on an area outside a button or text field, that I could then catch that and take action - primarily dismiss any keyboard if a text field was active (resignFirstResponder). However, tapping on a label or other blank area in the control panel would not pass things through. The above discussions were helpful in coming up with my answer below.

Basically, I sub-classed UIStackView and overwrote the “point(inside:with) routine to look for the type of controls that needed the touch and “ignore” things like labels that I wanted to ignore. It also checks for inside UIStackView’s so that things can recurse into the control panel structure.

The code is a perhaps a little more verbose than it should be. But it was helpful in debugging and hopefully provides more clarity in what the routine is doing. Just be sure in Interface Builder to change the class of the UIStackView's to PassThruStack.

class PassThruStack: UIStackView {

override func point(inside point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> Bool {

    for view in self.subviews {
        if !view.isHidden {
            let isStack = view is UIStackView
            let isButton = view is UIButton
            let isText = view is UITextField
            if isStack || isButton || isText {
                let pointInside = view.point(inside: self.convert(point, to: view), with: event)
                if pointInside {
                    return true
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return false
}

}