iPhone UITextField background color

Question

I am unable to control the background color of a UITextField with a borderStyle= UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect. With this border style the backgroundColor property only seems to control a very narrow line along the inner edge of the rounded rectangle. The rest of the field remains white.

However, if the borderStyle is set to UIBorderStyle=UITextBorderStyleBezel then the entire background of the UITextField is controlled by its backgroundColor property.

Is this a feature? Is there a way to control the backgroundColor of a UITextField with a borderStyle=UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect?

Answer 1

To change the background color in a UITextField you first need to use a different style of text field to the "rounded" style (such as the "no border" style) either in Interface Builder or programmatically.

You can then easily change the background colour with

textField.backgroundColor = backgroundColor; 

where textField is your UITextField, and backgroundColor is a UIColor.

As a further tip- if you wish to restore the rounded corners appearance, you will first need to

#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h> 

and then set

textField.layer.cornerRadius=8.0f; textField.layer.masksToBounds=YES 

for this feature to work

Answer 2

The other answers don't have the shadows present on a UITextField with Rounded Rectangle style. After trying many options I finally just placed a UIView over the UITextField, with an identical frame and auto resize mask, set the alpha to 0.3, and set the background to a blue color. Then I used the snippet from Peter Johnson's answer to clip the rounded edges off the colored overlay view. Also, uncheck the 'User Interaction Enabled' checkbox in IB to allow touch events to cascade down to the UITextField underneath. Looks perfect now.

Side effect: your text will also be colorized (doesn't matter if it's black)

#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>  colorizeOverlayView.layer.cornerRadius = 6.0f; colorizeOverlayView.layer.masksToBounds = YES;