Uicontroleventeditingchanged Doesn't Get Fired When Using Settext of Uitextfield

UIControlEventEditingChanged doesn't get fired when using setText of UITextfield

I had to rate this question up because this is super important.

It appears this has changed in iOS6. Maybe even iOS5. This event USED to be the preferred method for observing text changes in a UITextField. I've been using it since iOS3. After recompiling my app on iOS6 to perform some updates, it mysteriously stopped working. Parts of my app use:

[UITextField insertText];

and others use

[UITextField setText];

or

UITextField.text = @"xxx";

For whatever reason it's important to note that setText events no longer fire the Editing Changed event. If you use an insertText method, it still works.

So if you're in a bind and you just need a quick fix, you can change out your code from:

textField.text;

or

[textField setText:@"xxx"];

to

textField.text = @"";
[textField insertText:@"new text"];

This also works:

[((UITextField*)view) sendActionsForControlEvents:UIControlEventEditingChanged];

I hope this helps someone, because I wasted an entire day trying to figure out why this code suddenly stopped working when I moved up to iOS6.

You can still use NSNotificationCenter as well. See the UITextField reference for more info:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitextfield

UITextField value changed not firing when field is updated

As suggested by TheRonin, use UITextFieldDelegate and implement the following method

- (BOOL)textField:(UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange:(NSRange)range replacementString:(NSString *)string

UITextField with secure entry, always getting cleared before editing

Set,

textField.clearsOnBeginEditing = NO;

Note: This won't work if secureTextEntry = YES. It seems, by default, iOS clears the text of secure entry text fields before editing, no matter clearsOnBeginEditing is YES or NO.

Trigger textFieldShouldClear programmatically

I ended up subclassing UITextField and implementing the following method:

- (void)setText:(NSString *)text {

    [super setText:text];

    [self textInputChanged:nil];
}

Where textInputChanged: is the UITextFieldDelegate method that I needed to get called whenever text is set programmatically.

Changing value of UITextField using an array doesn't work

Setting the array:

NSArray *lstaInfo = @[@"fruits",@"bee", @"computer", @"car"];

Then populating fields:

-(void)setFields{

  field0.text = lstaInfo[0];
  field1.text = lstaInfo[1];
  field2.text = lstaInfo[2];
  field3.text = lstaInfo[3];
}

UITextField text change event

From proper way to do uitextfield text change call back:

I catch the characters sent to a UITextField control something like this:

// Add a "textFieldDidChange" notification method to the text field control.

In Objective-C:

[textField addTarget:self 
              action:@selector(textFieldDidChange:) 
    forControlEvents:UIControlEventEditingChanged];

In Swift:

textField.addTarget(self, action: #selector(textFieldDidChange), for: .editingChanged)

Then in the textFieldDidChange method you can examine the contents of the textField, and reload your table view as needed.

You could use that and put calculateAndUpdateTextFields as your selector.

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