Given a view, how do I get its viewController?

Question

I have a pointer to a UIView. How do I access its UIViewController? [self superview] is another UIView, but not the UIViewController, right?

Answer 1

The fast and generic way in Swift 3:

extension UIResponder {
    func parentController<T: UIViewController>(of type: T.Type) -> T? {
        guard let next = self.next else {
            return nil
        }
        return (next as? T) ?? next.parentController(of: T.self)
    }
}

//Use:
class MyView: UIView {
    ...
    let parentController = self.parentController(of: MyViewController.self)
}

Answer 2

I think you can propagate the tap to the view controller and let it handle it. This is more acceptable approach. As for accessing a view controller from its view, you should maintain a reference to a view controller, since there is no another way. See this thread, it might help: Accessing view controller from a view

Answer 3

From the UIResponder documentation for nextResponder:

The UIResponder class does not store or set the next responder automatically, instead returning nil by default. Subclasses must override this method to set the next responder. UIView implements this method by returning the UIViewController object that manages it (if it has one) or its superview (if it doesn’t); UIViewController implements the method by returning its view’s superview; UIWindow returns the application object, and UIApplication returns nil.

So, if you recurse a view’s nextResponder until it is of type UIViewController, then you have any view’s parent viewController.

Note that it still may not have a parent view controller. But only if the view has not part of a viewController’s view’s view hierarchy.

Swift 3 and Swift 4.1 extension:

extension UIView {
    var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
        var parentResponder: UIResponder? = self
        while parentResponder != nil {
            parentResponder = parentResponder!.next
            if let viewController = parentResponder as? UIViewController {
                return viewController
            }
        }
        return nil
    }
}

Swift 2 extension:

extension UIView {
    var parentViewController: UIViewController? {
        var parentResponder: UIResponder? = self
        while parentResponder != nil {
            parentResponder = parentResponder!.nextResponder()
            if let viewController = parentResponder as? UIViewController {
                return viewController
            }
        }
        return nil
    }
}

Objective-C category:

@interface UIView (mxcl)
- (UIViewController *)parentViewController;
@end

@implementation UIView (mxcl)
- (UIViewController *)parentViewController {
    UIResponder *responder = self;
    while ([responder isKindOfClass:[UIView class]])
        responder = [responder nextResponder];
    return (UIViewController *)responder;
}
@end

This macro avoids category pollution:

#define UIViewParentController(__view) ({ \
    UIResponder *__responder = __view; \
    while ([__responder isKindOfClass:[UIView class]]) \
        __responder = [__responder nextResponder]; \
    (UIViewController *)__responder; \
})

Answer 4

If you are not familiar with the code and you want to find ViewController coresponding to given view, then you can try:

1. Run app in debug
2. Navigate to screen
3. Start View inspector
4. Grab the View you want to find (or a child view even better)
5. From the right pane get the address (e.g. 0x7fe523bd3000)
6. In debug console start writing commands:

    po (UIView *)0x7fe523bd3000
    po [(UIView *)0x7fe523bd3000 nextResponder]
    po [[(UIView *)0x7fe523bd3000 nextResponder] nextResponder]
    po [[[(UIView *)0x7fe523bd3000 nextResponder] nextResponder] nextResponder]
    ...

In most cases you will get UIView, but from time to time there will be UIViewController based class.

Answer 5

If you set a breakpoint, you can paste this into the debugger to print the view hierarchy:

po [[UIWindow keyWindow] recursiveDescription]

You should be able to find your view's parent somewhere in that mess :)

Answer 6

Yes, the superview is the view that contains your view. Your view shouldn't know which exactly is its view controller, because that would break MVC principles.

The controller, on the other hand, knows which view it's responsible for (self.view = myView), and usually, this view delegates methods/events for handling to the controller.

Typically, instead of a pointer to your view, you should have a pointer to your controller, which in turn can either execute some controlling logic, or pass something to its view.