[ios] Cancelling a UIGestureRecognizer

You have a view with a handful of gesture recognizers. Perhaps some of them are chained together with requireGestureRecognizerToFail so that they interact well.

Sometimes, you still need to respond to other user interaction, and cause any pending gesture to immediately fail. There isn't an API for that.

I had this issue when my application's "timeline" view, which was using pinch, tap, and pan gestures in concert, needed to grow temporary UIButton subviews. The buttons worked fine, but pressing them also triggered the gesture recognizers - very confusing for the user.

Here's the solution.

How to forcibly cancel a UIGestureRecnogizer

Add a new category (I call it "Cancel") to the UIGestureRecognizer class extending it with a new cancel method:

@interface UIGestureRecognizer (Cancel)

- (void)cancel;

@end

And implement the new method like this:

@implementation UIGestureRecognizer (Cancel)

- (void)cancel

{

self.enabled = NO;

self.enabled = YES;

}

@end

The simple trick of switching off and back on a gesture will force it to cancel.

Then for bonus points, I add a category on UIView to make it easy to cancel all the gestures attached to it. I tend not to hold the gestures as member variables in my view controller because there isn't any need to do so - they are retained by the view you attach them to.

//-----------------------------------------

// In .h file:

@interface UIView (CancelAllGestures)

- (void) cancelAllGestureRecognizers;

@end

//-----------------------------------------

// In .m file:

@implementation UIView (CancelAllGestures)

- (void) cancelAllGestureRecognizers

{

for (UIGestureRecognizer *gesture in self.gestureRecognizers)

{

[gesture cancel];

}

}

@end

This new method could then be easily used in my main view controller, by attaching it to the my UIButton objects as a new action:

[button addTarget:myViewWithGestures

action:@selector(cancelAllGestureRecognizers)

forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchDown];

Categories are a useful Objective C feature that really do help to make your code more clear and readable. Here they provide the means for another simple solution. I hope you find it useful.