iOS Delegation vs Subclassing

[North Bronson]

I've been working with Cocoa and Appkit (and UIKit) for a short time now and I'm still trying to get my head around delegation.

I have a Custom View (myCustomView) and this view has a Scroll View (myScrollView) as a subview. I want myScrollView to respond to touch for the purpose of scrolling, but I want myCustomView to receive the touch if the user is *not* scrolling (just a tap).

I found an example on the web that works perfectly. I subclass UIScrollView and override touchesEnded: to check for Dragging.

This works, but it seems like there might be cleaner way to do it than using this subclass. I thought about just using a category to extend UIScrollView, but I might want to use a stock UIScrollView elsewhere in the app.

I thought about trying to do this with delegation. I can make myCustomView a delegate of myScrollView. Then I can have myScrollView send a message to myCustomView when a touch ended *without* dragging. I don't really know how to go about doing this and was wondering if anyone had any ideas.

I see a method called scrollViewDidEndDragging:willDecelerate: and I think that might do the trick. I guess what I'm really looking for is a method like: scrollViewDidEndTouchWithoutDragging: but I don't see something like that already. Maybe I should just write that myself and add it as a category.

Also, does everyone here find themselves using delegates more often that subclassing (at least in a case like this, where the only reason I am subclassing is for one method)? It seems like subclassing is a little more "straight-forward" but it seems like delegation is stylish and "cleaner" -- if that makes sense.

 

[narut]

To detect a "tap" you could simply do something like this.

- (void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {

	NSSet *allTouches = [event allTouches];
	switch ([allTouches count]) { 
		case 1: {// One finger touth
			UITouch *touch = [[allTouches allObjects] objectAtIndex:0];
			if ([touch tapCount] == 1) { // Single tap
				// Do something
			} 
		}
	}
}

The switch part is not necessary, but might come in handy if you want to extend capability to handle two-finger tap or double tap in the future.

If you want to use stock ScrollView then you might implement this in your View Controller class (which have this ScrollView in it's view) instead.