How to suppress virtual Keyboard slide-in animation?

Question

I've got a problem with creating a modal search view that emulates the behaviour of that of the Weather app. Specifically, there are two animations, that are bothering me and introduce unneeded 0.2 s delays:

• When the modal view becomes visible, I give focus to the UISearchDisplayController.searchBar by caling becomeFirstResponder in viewDidAppear. However, the keyboard is not visible, when the modal view has slid in, but needs another 0.2s to slide in after the animation of tehe modal view transition is complete. Moving the call to another callback like viewWillAppear or viewDidLoad did no good, the keyboard won't show up in the first place.

• When the user touches cancel, there is another animation taking place, before the delegate's searchDisplayControllerDidEndSearch method is called, expanding the search text field and "melting" away the button. Again, this animation is unneded as the modal view is supposed to transition out when the button is touched.

• Additionally, when I dismiss and re-present the same view, not only does the keyboard slide in after the transition, but the cancel button does the same (luckily simultaneously).

I am aware of a similar problem described here: Keyboard Animation Issues When Calling becomeFirstResponder within a Modal View Controller. However, it seems like the behaviour of the search bar is sligtly differet then that of text field. I could not reproduce the steps described by that author to make the keyboard visible by calling becomeFirstResponder in viewDidLoad.

Regards, Chris

Answer 1

I think I found your answer. When you add a search bar using the interface builder, you can do it two ways: "Search bar" and "Search bar and Search Display Controller".

I was using the second and was having the very same problem you described. I could only invoke the keyboard (using becomeFirstResponder) on "viewDidAppear". But if you do it adding just the search bar it works. Now I can call becomeFirstResponder on "viewDidLoad" and the keyboard appears together with the view itself.

I means a little more work, but really not much. You have to set your controller to be the delegate of the search bar. I added a list view for the results and made my controller become its delegate and its datasource.