Displaying placeholder text in UITextField created through data source

Question

Background: I have a UITableView which has three rows with custom UITextFields that are populated from a TableDataSource. The default text in these text fields is also populated from the data source (default values for database fields).

I am able to automatically clear the UITextField when a user selects / clicks on a particular UITextField.

Problem: If a user selects a particular UITextField but then moves onto another UITextField without editing the text then I would like the original default text to re-appear. I have tried setting the UITextField to nil in the delegate's 'didEndEditing' method and that did not work.

Can someone please advise if they know of a way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can simple do it using the placeholder property of UITextField, but the text will appear as a little blurred manner, if you want to show the previous value then you can use the following solution:

You can do it using the textFieldDidEndEditing delegate method.

 - (void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField
{
   if(textField.text.lenght == 0)
   {
      textField.text = yourPreviousText;
   }
}

And in textFieldShouldBeginEditing

- (BOOL)textFieldShouldBeginEditing:(UITextField *)textField
{
   yourPreviousText = textField.text;
}

yourPreviousText is a NSString object declared in the class scope.

Answer 2

Solution: I was setting the placeholder text using the UITextfield.text property. I should rather be using the UITextField.placeholder property. Setting this property automatically ensures that the placeholder text disappears and reappears based on the editing performed by the user. Takes away a lot of work in terms of trying to figure out what the user has entered / not entered.