Hide keyboard on touch anywhere outside UITextField when view includes UICollectionView

Question

There are some answers out there such as this, but in the case where there is a UIScrollView or UICollectionView present, it doesn't work.
The touchesBegan method on the viewController will never get called.

On screen, I have a UITextField at the top.
Below that, filling up the rest of the screen is a UICollectionView.
I need to dismiss the keyboard if I touch anywhere besides the UITextField (including the collection view obviously)

So what is the best way to do this?

For such a common UI paradigm it seems like there should be a well-known solution, but I've yet to come across it.

Answer 1

To dismiss Keyboard on tap of the View: Add a Tap gesture to your ViewController.collectionView as follows:

//declare a property to store your current responder
@property (nonatomic, assign) id currentResponder;
//in viewDidLoad:

UITapGestureRecognizer *singleTap = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(resignOnTap:)];
    [singleTap setNumberOfTapsRequired:1];
    [singleTap setNumberOfTouchesRequired:1];
    [self.collectionView addGestureRecognizer:singleTap];


//Implement the below delegate method:

- (void)textFieldDidBeginEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
    self.currentResponder = textField;
}

//Implement resignOnTap:

- (void)resignOnTap:(id)sender {
    [self.currentResponder resignFirstResponder];
}

Answer 2

Here's a better solution which doesn't require adding gesture recognisers individually to everything. It's in Swift, but could easily be converted to ObjC.

Add the following to your viewDidLoad():

let tap = UITapGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: "dismissKeyboard")
tap.cancelsTouchesInView = false
view.addGestureRecognizer(tap)

and then add the following method declaration:

func dismissKeyboard()
{
    view.endEditing(true)
}

...where view is your text field.

Answer 3

The simple way to do it is:

- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    [self.view endEditing:YES]; 
}