ios 13 - Custom SearchBar with UISearchBar _searchField not working

Question

Before Xcode-11-Beta (ios13) below code for custom searchbar value for key to get textField working fine. Now getting below crash log.

'NSGenericException', reason: 'Access to UISearchBar's _searchField ivar is prohibited. This is an application bug'

- (UITextField *)textField
{
 return [self valueForKey:@"_searchField"];
}

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

The SDK now provides UISearchBar.searchTextField so you can simply replace your private API implementation with the public API.

searchBar.searchTextField.backgroundColor = [UIColor blueColor];

Answer 2

If we want to support iOS 12 and earlier also while compiling with Xcode 11, then we can make an extension of UISearchBar where we can grab the textfield

extension UISearchBar {

    var textField : UITextField? {
        if #available(iOS 13.0, *) {
            return self.searchTextField
        } else { // Fallback on earlier versions
            for subview in subviews.first?.subviews ?? [] {
                if let textField = subview as? UITextField {
                    return textField
                }
            }
        }
        return nil
    }
}

USAGE

searchBar.textField?.font = UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 15.0)

Here we can access all textField's properties and modify as per our needs in UISearchBar

There is a change in the view hierarchy. So by printing self.subviews[0]).subviews where self in UISearchBar

For iOS 12 and earlier

For iOS 13+

Along with UISearchBarBackground, now we have UISearchBarSearchContainerView and UISearchBarScopeContainerView whereas UISearchBarTextField is missing which is replaced by an extension provided by Apple in UISearchTextField class

extension UISearchBar {

    
    open var searchTextField: UISearchTextField { get }
}

So we can directly access searchBar.searchTextField in iOS 13 and above devices whereas it will lead to a crash if we try to access this property in iOS 12 and below OS devices.

The crash will be like this:

[UISearchBar searchTextField]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

Here is the Apple doc for this

Answer 3

I had the same crash, with IOS 13 you don't need anymore the .value(forKey:)

Here is the line that caused the crash:

if let searchField = searchController.searchBar.value(forKey: "_searchField") as? UITextField {

And this was the fix:

let searchField = searchController.searchBar.searchTextField