Okay i figured out what the problem was. They first responder was being resigned but the keyboard was not disappearing because of a focus issue. There is a default behaviour on modal views to not dismiss the keyboard (which is not a bug apparently). So after returning from the modal view it was still having this behaviour (resigning first responder but not dismissing keyboard). The way i solved this was by placing the following code in both the modal views .m files:
- (BOOL)disablesAutomaticKeyboardDismissal {
return NO;
}
This solved it for me. Then by either using:
[search resignFirstResponder];
or
[self.view endEditing: YES];
The keyboard will dismiss fine!