Interaction beyond bounds of UIView

Question

Is it possible for a UIButton (or any other control for that matter) to receive touch events when the UIButton's frame lies outside of it's parent's frame? Cause when I try this, my UIButton doesn't seem to be able to receive any events. How do I work around this?

Answer 1

Yes. You can override the hitTest:withEvent: method to return a view for a larger set of points than that view contains. See the UIView Class Reference.

Edit: Example:

- (UIView *)hitTest:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    CGFloat radius = 100.0;
    CGRect frame = CGRectMake(-radius, -radius,
                              self.frame.size.width + radius,
                              self.frame.size.height + radius);

    if (CGRectContainsPoint(frame, point)) {
        return self;
    }
    return nil;
}

Edit 2: (After clarification:) In order to ensure that the button is treated as being within the parent's bounds, you need to override pointInside:withEvent: in the parent to include the button's frame.

- (BOOL)pointInside:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    if (CGRectContainsPoint(self.view.bounds, point) ||
        CGRectContainsPoint(button.view.frame, point))
    {
        return YES;
    }
    return NO;
}

Note the code just there for overriding pointInside is not quite correct. As Summon explains below, do this:

-(BOOL)pointInside:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
    {
    if ( CGRectContainsPoint(self.oversizeButton.frame, point) )
        return YES;

    return [super pointInside:point withEvent:event];
    }

Note that you'd very likely do it with self.oversizeButton as an IBOutlet in this UIView subclass; then you can just drag the "oversize button" in question, to, the special view in question. (Or, if for some reason you were doing this a lot in a project, you'd have a special UIButton subclass, and you could look through your subview list for those classes.) Hope it helps.

Answer 2

@jnic, I am working on iOS SDK 5.0 and in order to get your code working right I had to do this:

- (BOOL)pointInside:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
if (CGRectContainsPoint(button.frame, point)) {
    return YES;
}
return [super pointInside:point withEvent:event]; }

The container view in my case is a UIButton and all the child elements are also UIButtons that can move outside the bounds of the parent UIButton.

Best

Answer 3

In the parent view you can override the hit test method:

- (UIView *)hitTest:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    CGPoint translatedPoint = [_myButton convertPoint:point fromView:self];

    if (CGRectContainsPoint(_myButton.bounds, translatedPoint)) {
        return [_myButton hitTest:translatedPoint withEvent:event];
    }
    return [super hitTest:point withEvent:event];

}

In this case, if the point falls within the bounds of your button, you forward the call there; if not, revert to the original implementation.