UISearchBAR scopeBar tintColor

Question

Has anyone managed to color the scopebar portion of a UISearchBar, it has a tintColor property but setting it does not affect the attached scopebar UISegmentedControl. Ive got a

Answer 1

This is interesting, turns out the scope bar is a somewhat customised segmented control.

From the docs: UISegmentedControl uses this property only if the style of the segmented control is UISegmentedControlStyleBar.

Now the scope bar segmented control looks like UISegmentedControlStyleBar but isn't, it's some undocumented style:

NSLog(@"scope bar style is %d", scopeBar.segmentedControlStyle);
> scope bar style is 7

You can try this, which does actually set the tint but it looks like arse:

[scopeBar setSegmentedControlStyle:UISegmentedControlStyleBar];
[scopeBar setTintColor: UIColorFromRGB(0x990066)];
> scope bar style is 2

Internally there are some instance variables influencing this: _segementedControlFlags.style and _barStyle but you cannot hack those unless you bypass the sanctioned API.

The best course of action is to raise it with Apple and hope they include a fix in a future release.