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How do I subclass UITextField and override drawPlaceholderInRect to change Placeholder color

Asked 2011-05-27T11:17:36.747
17

I have a 3 UITextField with placeholder text set. On one of the UITextField I want the placeholder text to be red.

Now after googling it seems the best way to do this is to subclass UITextField and override drawPlaceholderInRect.

How do I go about subclassing and overriding drawPlaceholderInRect? I've not found any code examples or tutorials on this and I'm new to objective-c and iOS development so finding it tricky to work it out.

Answer:

Created a new objective-c class called CustomUITextFieldPlaceholder which subclassed UITextField. In CustomUITextFieldPlaceholder.m put the following code

 @implementation CustomUITextFieldPlaceholder

- (void)drawPlaceholderInRect:(CGRect)rect {
    // Set colour and font size of placeholder text
    [[UIColor redColor] setFill];
    [[self placeholder] drawInRect:rect withFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:12]];
}

@end

To implement the above in your project

#import "CustomUITextFieldPlaceholder.h"

and

IBOutlet CustomUITextFieldPlaceHolder *txtName;

Note: This works and I believe is correct practice, however I have not fully tested it. Hope this example helps others in my situation.

Edit:

Changed

[[UIColor redColor] setFill];

for

[[UIColor colorWithRed:255.0 green:0.0 blue:0.0 alpha:0.7] setFill];

So that I could set the opacity to 70% to mimic default placeholder.

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1 Answer

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[yourTextfield setValue:[UIColor colorWithRed:62.0/255.0f green:62.0/255.0f blue:62./255.0f alpha:1.0f]  forKeyPath:@"_placeholderLabel.textColor"];

I guess this would be helpful

answered 2013-04-08T10:43:10.987

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