Get superView of custom class

Question

I have a custom class myCustomClass which is a subclass of UITextField. (I'm going to call myCustomClass in a viewControllers class.)

In myCustomClass, I'm trying to check what kind of viewController the class that called it is. (UIViewController, UITableViewController etc.)

I tried:

if ([self.superview.nextResponder isKindOfClass[UIViewController class]]) {
    NSLog(@"View Controller");
} else if ([self.superview.nextResponder isKindOfClass[UITableViewController class]) {
    NSLog(@"TableView Controller");
}

I only get a result if the superclass is a viewController. So I did the following:

NSLog(@"%@", self.superview.nextResponder);

Results

UIViewController Class - ViewController

UITableViewController Class - UITableViewCell

How can I check if it's a UITableViewController?

Answer 1

For your specific case, you can use [self.superView isMemberOfClass:[UITableViewCell class]] to check if your custom view is inside a table view cell, which (unless you are using tableViewCell in an unusual way!) means that it's being called from a UITableViewController.

More generally, if you wanted to find out the containing view controller, you can recursively walk up the responder chain to find the containing viewController as in the second answer in this post: Get to UIViewController from UIView?

It's also important to note that there is a difference between isKindOfClass: and isMemberOfClass:

• isKindOfClass returns YES if 'the receiver is an instance of given class or an instance of any class that inherits from that class.'

• isMemberOfClass returns YES if ' the receiver is an instance of a given class.'

Therefore, your UITableViewController, which inherits from UIViewController, will answer YES to isKindOfClass:[UIViewController class], will your if statement to act unexpectedly. (Though in the example it also didn't work correctly because you still needed to walk up the responder chain further).

So, if you in fact are comparing a UIViewController to a UITableViewController use -isMemberOfClass and your logic in the example would work as expected.