How to move the buttons in a UIAlertView to make room for an inserted UITextField?

Question

[EDIT] Hmm. Perhaps this question should be titled \"what is the default user-input dialog view called in CocoaTouch?\" I realize that I can create an entire view that is

Answer 1

Most probably You would want to look into the addTextFieldWithValue method of the UIAlertView? Add the following code somewhere at the top of Your class:

@interface UIAlertView ()
- (void) addTextFieldWithValue: (NSString*) val label: (NSString*) label;
- (UITextField*) textField;
@end

It’s not official, but IMHO it’s not getting You rejected from the App store and it’s much better solution than hacking the textfield into the dialog Yourself.

Answer 2

https://github.com/TomSwift/TSAlertView

This library actually creates the control from scratch rather than attempting to hack UIAlertView, which is generally a Bad Plan (TM)

Answer 3

Zoul proposed the best method, to capture user input just do:

a) Add the UITextFieldDelegate protocol to your class.

b) Do something like

    UIAlertView *insertScore = [UIAlertView new];
    [insertScore setDelegate:self];
    [insertScore setTitle:@"New Title!"];
    [insertScore addButtonWithTitle:@"Cancel"];
    [insertScore addButtonWithTitle:@"Ok"];

    insertScore.message = @"\n";

    [insertScore addTextFieldWithValue:@"Input" label:@"player"];

    [[insertScore textField] setDelegate:self];

    [insertScore show]; 

    [insertScore release];

c) The crucial part was to set the delegate of the textField to self, then to access data you can simply:

- (void)alertView:(UIAlertView *)alertView clickedButtonAtIndex:(NSInteger)buttonIndex 
{
  NSLog(@"%@",[[alertView textField] text]);
}

Hope this helps someone, since I had to think a bit to get it right.

Answer 4

Try putting in some (\n)s after the title in the UIAlertView initialization. That will push down the buttons. And I agree with Stephen here. There are chances that Apple might reject an app if it uses controls in a way they shouldn't be. (there's some clause in the Human Interface Guidelines about that!)

Answer 5

Even if you can get this working it's not going to be very iPhone-y. The UIAlertView really is not designed for user input like this. If you look in all the Apple apps you'll see that they use a new view that displayed using the presentModalViewController: method of UIViewController.

Edit: This advice is no longer as true as it was when I wrote it. Apple have increasingly used alert views as text entry boxes and iOS5 even includes native support without having to mess around with views (check out the alertViewStyle property).

I think maybe if you need to have four buttons then using a custom UIViewController is probably still the right way to go. But if you just want to enter a password with OK/Cancel buttons then it's fine.

Answer 6

This simpler method works for me:

UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"UIAlertView"
    message:@"<Alert message>" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"OK"
    otherButtonTitles:nil];
[alert addTextFieldWithValue:@"" label:@"Text Field"];

Hope that helps. Oh if you needed multiple button rows then it's:

[alert setNumberOfRows:3];

Cheers