UITextFieldDelegate vs UITextField control events

Question

If I want to handle changes to a UITextField, such as the user typing in it; it seems like this can be done either by assigning a delegate to that text field, and then having th

Answer 1

You're right; you can essentially do the same thing via both, but UIControl is lower level and lets you siphon off each particular UIEvent to different targets via [UIControl addTarget:action:forControlEvents:] where as there is only a single delegate.

I would also say that the UITextField delegate protocol is simply there as a more convenient, higher level alternative to UIControl/UIEvent as a way to manage the behaviour of a UITextField.

The most common delegate pattern is UITableView DataSource and Delegate and I would say that using the UITextField delegate protocol is quite similar and therefore looks far more straight forward with more defined intentions than handing the messages from UIControl directly.