UITextView as inputAccessoryView like iMessage

Question

I want to have the same kind of behaviour as iMessage has for its input. I don't know in what end I should start, so I'll describe what I want to do and you can (I hope) give me suggestions on how to do this. I code in Swift so I'd like it to be in Swift if you provide any code.

What I want

I want to have a button on my screen (not an UITextView or UITextField) which upon press shows the keyboard, and where the keyboard has a UIToolBar with an UITextView in it. When I type in the UITextView the ToolBar/TextView expands up until a certain point then it starts to scroll.

How on earth do I do this? I've been trying for an hour but I can't seem to trigger the keyboard unless I have a UITextView or UITextField to set as becomeFirstResponder(). Furthermore I don't understand how I'm supposed to attach a UITextView to the UIToolBar once I get the keyboard up. I have added the UIToolBar, but not the UITextField.

Cheers

a good start could be a search on google about it, there are also people that made control like that available on git. For instance https://github.com/muukii/NextGrowingTextView?utm_campaign=This%2BWeek%2Bin%2BSwift&utm_medium=email&utm_source=This_Week_in_Swift_79 — Andrea, Mar 24 '16 at 14:06
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20108162/make-uitextview-parent-be-its-own-inputaccessoryview?s=7|1.6466 — rmaddy, Mar 24 '16 at 14:40
I fixed this problem with childViewController. See my answer [here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/44219487/1836420). — ChikabuZ, May 27 '17 at 17:00

score -1 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 27 '16 at 20:27

This should do it for you: https://github.com/AlexLittlejohn/ALTextInputBar

It grows like you mentioned, and it's also at the bottom of screen, like an input accessory view.

In your pods file copy paste
```
pod 'ALTextInputBar'
```
Run your podfile

Configure it like this

import ALTextInputBar

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    let textInputBar = ALTextInputBar()

    // The magic sauce
    // This is how we attach the input bar to the keyboard
    override var inputAccessoryView: UIView? {
        get {
            return textInputBar
        }
    }

    // Another ingredient in the magic sauce
    override func canBecomeFirstResponder() -> Bool {
        return true
    }
}

UITextView as inputAccessoryView like iMessage

What I want

1 Answers1