How do I get a UIViewController given a UITextView?

Question

I'm handling code in a UITextViewDelegate. Each function there receives the UITextView instance that received the event, for example:

- (void)textViewDidBeginEditing:(UITextView*)textView
{

}

Inside that method however, only given the textView, I need to access the UIViewController that contains the textView.

Using textView.superview (even multiple stages of it) doesn't seem to work - I only get:

• textView.superview = an instance of UIView
• textView.superview.superview = UIViewControllerWrapperView
• textView.superview.superview.superview = UINavigationTransitionView
• textView.superview.superview.superview.superview = UILayoutContainerView
• textView.superview.superview.superview.superview.superview = UIWindow
• textView.superview.superview.superview.superview.superview.superview = nil

I found the class names by printing out something like

printf( "class: %s\n", [[[uiv class] description] UTF8String] ) ;

Answer 1

There is no way to do this. A UIViewController knows what UIView it manages, but a view does not have a reference back to its view controller (and might not even have a view controller).

The -superview method returns another UIView, which is not the same thing as a UIViewController.

Why do you need the view controller? What are you trying to accomplish?

As an aside, you could save yourself a few keystrokes by using NSLog instead of printf:

NSLog(@"class: %@", [uiv class]);

Answer 2

Out of curiosity, why isn't your view controller acting as the UITextViewDelegate? In most of the code I've seen (including my own), the view controllers themselves tend to act as delegates.

If you need to extract this functionality into a separate class, perhaps the view controller could pass a reference to itself to the UITextViewDelegate.