Capturing touches in UIWebView

Question

Having trouble capturing touch events in UIWebView. Want to be able to sense touches on words on scrolling HTML page for the purpose of inserting hyperlinks into the HTML [which I fully control] at the point of touch. Obviously some existing agent is already sensing touches, because I get a "Copy or Define" popup with magnifying glass.

I've been able to capture touch events in a different custom UIViewController in my app that has no UIWebView, placing:

self.view.userInteractionEnabled = YES;
self.view.multipleTouchEnabled = YES;

in viewDidLoad and placing

- (BOOL) canBecomeFirstResponder
{
 NSLog(@"canBecomeFirstResponder");
 return YES;
}

in the implementation. Then "touchesBegan" is called whenever I touch anywhere on the view controller.

But the same code isn't effective on the custom view controller where most of the screen is covered by a UIWebView. Curiously, touches in the small UIToolBar at the bottom does indeed call "touches Began" but something in the UIWebView is pre-empting my "touchesBegan".

Is there a way to capture these events without disabling everything UIWebView wants to do? I wouldn't want to lose scrolling and other features.

Thanks. And Happy New Year.

MusiGenesis MusiGenesis · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-02T16:28:37

Capturing touches on a UIWebView is a Pandora's Box of pain. Since you want only taps, probably the easiest thing to do is to place a UIView with [UIColor clearColor] as the background color over top of the web view. In this view, override hitTest: (instead of overriding touchesBegan: etc.) and use it to determine the location of the tap. hitTest: returns a UIView, so if you want the web view to respond to the tap, just return the web view from your hitTest: override; otherwise return the overlay view, which will then receive all the touches... methods.

Capturing touches in UIWebView

1 Answers