Providing editable and non-editable fields on the iPhone

Question

I would like to present information to the user of my app in a non-editable way but allow editing after a button press (of the edit button). Is there any way of easily creating this transition from non-editable to editable?

I have considered using UILabels for the non-editable fields and programatically removing them and showing UITextFields instead. However, this would seem to put a lot of the formatting into code which I would prefer not to do (to keep the advantages of IB).

I also considered having both UILabel and UITextField in the same place in my nib and trying to hide the one I don't want. This seems quite hacky though.

Maybe I would just be best off with two separate views?

Any comments on the above methods or better ways of doing it would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

if you set the enabled property of a UITextField to NO and change the borderStyle to UITextBorderStyleNone your textfield looks almost like a UILabel. Maybe you want to toggle those two values.. Something like this:
EDIT: And if you change the font they look exactly like UILabels.

- (IBAction)toggleEdit:(id)sender {
    for (id subview in self.view.subviews) {
        if ([subview isKindOfClass:[UITextField class]]) {
            BOOL isEnabled = ((UITextField*)subview).enabled;
            ((UITextField*)subview).enabled = !isEnabled;
            if (isEnabled) {
                // Disable
                ((UITextField*)subview).borderStyle = UITextBorderStyleNone;
                ((UITextField*)subview).font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:17.0];
            }
            else {
                // Enable
                ((UITextField*)subview).borderStyle = UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect;
                ((UITextField*)subview).font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12.0];
            }
        }
    }
}