uitextfield delegate must be file's owner?

Question

I've seen a few references (eg here) in response to folks having trouble getting the keyboard to dismiss in iPhone that say "double check that the delegate is attached to file's owner.

Is this necessarily true? Or just standard practice? Can't I have other objects in my nib, such as a subclass of UIViewController, and make connections to those as I like? I'd hate to have to route everything into the object that happens to be file owner.

That said, I'm having a difficult time getting the keyboard to disappear. I know it's connected to the delegate, because I can set break points and step through the code. I can see the [theTextField resignFirstResponder] get called (and return true), but the keyboard still won't go away.

Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

All of the controls in a particular view are intended to talk to the View Controller that owns the nib file. Even if you have, say, a UISlider that changes the value of a UITextField, this will be handled by a method in your UIViewController subclass that gets fired when the slider's value changes and updates the text in the text field. So 9 times out of 10 your UIViewController will be the nib file's owner.

Typically the text field delegate method you want to define is textFieldShouldReturn, calling resignFirstResponder on the text field, which it sounds like you've done.

Make sure that your outlet for theTextField is connected as well. It can be nil and the runtime will treat [nil resignFirstResponder] as a noop, not as an error.