Is there an iPhone equivalent to the NSTokenField control?

Question

In my app I want the user to type names into a UITextField (or equivalent) and then when they press return, it will put that word(s) in a blue bubble that's usually associated with tags. The cursor then moves to the end where they can add more "tags".

This can be seen when adding contacts in the To, CC & BCC fields in the Mail app, and also when selecting contacts in the Messages app.

How is this done? Is it something that's provided in the UIKit or available somewhere else?

Many thanks,

Michael

You might also take a look at [TITokenField](https://github.com/thermogl/TITokenField). — madrogue, Mar 18 '11 at 15:01
I came across this one that looks good: https://github.com/jasarien/JSTokenField but I didn't try it myself. — yonel, Oct 11 '11 at 07:20

andrewmclean · Answer 1 · 2014-07-29T14:44:15.853

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Venmo just open sourced their token field.

https://github.com/venmo/VENTokenField.git

edited Jul 29 '14 at 14:44

answered Jun 26 '14 at 18:41

andrewmclean

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score 6 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 28 '19 at 09:47

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edited:

The equivalent control in desktop Cocoa is an NSTokenField, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for Cocoa Touch.

edited Dec 28 '19 at 09:47

rptwsthi

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answered Aug 20 '09 at 18:00

e.James

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That's for Cocoa (OS X), not Cocoa Touch (iPhone) – rpetrich Aug 20 '09 at 18:05
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Argh. So it is. Sorry about that. – e.James Aug 20 '09 at 18:08
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Simple mistake. Maybe in 4.0 :) – rpetrich Aug 20 '09 at 18:11
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They don't know how to do it at apple headquarters, they just made a meeting with their engineers, they have drafted a plan to implement for 30 years, in order to obtain a stable tag input control :) – LolaRun Aug 12 '14 at 13:05
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Keep hoping.. Let the prayers continue ;) – JgdGuy Oct 17 '14 at 07:11
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Had to dust off my time machine to peep at iOS 42 SDK. Lots of cool new features, like running Xcode on Apple Watch, but still no UITokenField. – Russian Oct 17 '16 at 06:51
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Maybe in 12.0 :ooo – Tamás Sengel Feb 19 '18 at 15:58
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Maybe in 13.0 – João Colaço Oct 21 '18 at 09:10
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Maybe in 14.3.1 >:-( – Myron Slaw Jul 08 '19 at 05:31
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Maybe in 15.0 – Yozone W. Jul 27 '20 at 08:12
UISearchTextField is the current answer from Apple. See my answer... – orschaef Mar 20 '21 at 17:26
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maybe in 16.0 :'-( – amir Jun 13 '21 at 18:49

orschaef · Answer 3 · 2021-03-20T17:29:53.180

Since iOS 13 there exists UISearchTextField.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uisearchtextfield

You can see that component in action in the Photos App. That should fit for many use cases. By removing the leftView you can also get rid of the search icon.

But be aware: You can‘t mix text and tokens at various positions.

From the docs:

Tokens always occur contiguously before any text in the search field.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 15 '19 at 15:16

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Adding this here for reference:

Feel free to check out TaggerKit (a library I made), it's more or less what OP was talking about. You can basically add tags functionality to your app by just adding a view and a couple of properties.

answered Mar 15 '19 at 15:16

nknr

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score -1 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 20 '09 at 17:17

I dont think you can do it with any built in functionality in the SDK, never seen such a feature. What you could do however is implement it yourself, have some custom blue button with some text over it, and when the user hits return you can have some code that takes the text and returns you the button that you need, shouldnt be too bad to implement

Is there an iPhone equivalent to the NSTokenField control?

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