looking for a better way to activate and deactive background of text fields in my GUI (Cocoa OSX)

Question

I have a small gui app that consists selectable groups, each groups has a disclosure button to display its sub-group, an image and a text field. When you are editting a text field and select another group or another text field I want to end editting on the old text field. Also, I only want the background of a text field to be display when it is being editted.

I am trying to accomplish this by adding a call to activate the background in becomeFirstResponder and deactivate in textDidEndEditting. I ended up putting the call to deactivate in textDidEndEditting instead of resignFirstResponder because it seems that when I select the textField it calls resignFirstResponder right after becomeFirstResponder. I am wondering is this normal behavior or is this a sign of some other problem with my code? If this is normal behavior is there a better place to put the call to deactivate that background because having it in textDidEndEditting in problematic.

Answer 1

I don't think the same text field is calling both resignFirstResponder and becomeFirstResponder.

Text fields should automatically end editing when you move the focus to another UI element. You shouldn't have to manually manage that. However, if you want to alter a field upon it gaining or losing focus, you should put that functionality in becomeFirstResponder and resignFirstResponder respectively.