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

Simply do the following to change the tint color of ScopeBar:

The below code is in C# (Xamarin)

SearchController.SearchBar.TintColor = UIColor.Green;

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

The above approaches weren't working for me and I ended up using an iOS appearance method.

[[UISegmentedControl appearanceWhenContainedIn:[UISearchBar class], nil] setTintColor:[UIColor whiteColor]];

Answer 4

Change the tint color for changing color of scope bar. Note BarTintColor is different - this will change the color of the search bar..

Answer 5

This solution is in Swift, can be adapted to objective-c. You can find the segmented control view using below function

func findSegmentedControl(view : UIView) -> UIView? {
    for v in view.subviews {
        if v is UISegmentedControl {
            print(v)
            return v
        } else {
            if let found = findSegmentedControl(view : v) {
                return found
            }
        }
    }
    return nil
}

and then set tint color of the view. calling this function will be like this:

if let segmentedView = findSegmentedControl(view: searchController.searchBar) {                
            segmentedView.tintColor = UIColor.white
        }

Answer 6

Another band-aid solution to this problem (and a less complicated one) is you could add a semi-transparent UIImageView over the top of the Search bar and Scope bar and change the background color of the UIImageView to your desired tint color.