UIContextualAction triggers setEditing = true, how to disable this?

Question

I just implemented trailingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt and leadingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt to add swipe actions to my UITableViewCells.

func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, trailingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UISwipeActionsConfiguration
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, leadingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UISwipeActionsConfiguration

This triggers (on my UITableViewController) func setEditing(_ editing: Bool, animated: Bool) to be called with editing = true, which in turn also triggers my editing animation and other changes that I want when going into edit mode. (The contextual actions are not related to editing/deleting).

I don't want this, but have yet to find a way to disable this behaviour, even just detecting that setEditing is called via the swipe actions.

Any ideas?

I am afraid that's how it is supposed to work. – Sulthan Dec 26 '18 at 15:24 — Sulthan, Dec 26 '18 at 15:24

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 27 '18 at 10:32

I was able to solve this by triggering the "real" edit mode differently.

On my UITableViewController:

class MyTableViewController: UITableViewController {
  var realEditMode: Bool = false

  func setRealEditing(_ editing: Bool) {
    realEditMode = editing
    setEditing(realEditMode, animated: true)
  }

  // See Note 1 below
  @available(iOS 11.0, *)
  override func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, trailingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UISwipeActionsConfiguration {
    guard let item = itemForIndexPath(indexPath) else {
      return UISwipeActionsConfiguration(actions: [])
    }

    if realEditMode {
      return UISwipeActionsConfiguration(actions: [
        buildActionConfiguration(.delete, fromIndexPath: indexPath)
      ])
    } else {
      return UISwipeActionsConfiguration(actions: [
        buildActionConfiguration(.read, fromIndexPath: indexPath)
      ])
    }
  }

  @available(iOS 11.0, *)
  func buildActionConfiguration(_ action: MyCellActionEnum, fromIndexPath indexPath: IndexPath) -> UIContextualAction {
    // logic to build `UIContextualAction`
  }
}

And in my UITableViewCell check if the editing flag is set by manual triggering or by swipe edit triggering:

class MyCell: UITableViewCell {
  var myTableViewController: MyTableViewController?

  override func setEditing(_ editing: Bool, animated: Bool) {
    if editing && !(myTableViewController?.realEditMode ?? true) {
        return
    }

    super.setEditing(editing, animated: animated)
  }
}

Then on the edit buttons in the UI I changed setEditing(true/false, animated: true) to setRealEditing(true/false) instead.

Note 1

One problem I found was that when using trailingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt was that the delete button (⛔️) didn't work anymore. Tapping it did not trigger the confirmation swipe.

I found that there had to exist a trailingSwipeActionsConfigurationForRowAt with a UIContextualAction that was initialized with UIContextualAction(style: .destructive) (i.e had destructive style). This is the item that is then used for displaying the delete confirmation.

However I did not want that item to be visible when the regular swipe actions were used, so to only show it one "real edit mode" I used the realEditMode flag.

This worked for me and didn't seem too hacky. If anything more official pops up I'm more than happy to change the accepted answer.

did you ever figure out why the delete button doesn't work when these swipe actions are configured (your Note 1)? I'm asking as I am having the exact same problem. — MER, Dec 02 '20 at 22:45
@MER no, I did not go any further than the outlined solution I'm afraid. The solution worked fine for me so didn't try to understand why it didnt work — Erik Rothoff, Dec 03 '20 at 09:26

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 12 '23 at 01:20

If anyone comes across this, the answer is here:

Simply overriding tableView(_:willBeginEditingRowAt:) will prevent the call to setEditing(true) at the begin of a cell swipe.

Overriding tableView(_:didEndEditingRowAt:) prevents the call to setEditing(false) at the end of the cell editing.

UIContextualAction triggers setEditing = true, how to disable this?

2 Answers2

Note 1