Get UITextView text without delegate

Question

I have tried to make a location autocomplete text view class by subclassing UITextField and use Google Place Autocomplete API. This works great, but I have a design error due to the implementation. To observe when the user types text, I set the UITextFieldDelegate to self in the custom subclass and track changes to the typed text in textView:shouldChangeTextInRange:replacementText:. This works, but here is the design error: If someone now wants to check what is typed into the custom subclass by setting the delegate to something new, the delegate of my class is not set to the object of the class itself anymore. Now the custom class is useless. Is there any way to either get the text as it is typed without the delegate, prevent the delegate from being changed, or in any other way fix my problem?

A few options I have though about that could work, but in a bad way:

• Check regularly what the text property is: Should be obvious why busy waiting is a stupid idea
• Override the delegate property and set it to private: Not sure if this will even work, but if it did, the class is no longer a proper subclass of UITextField and all delegate methods are unavailable when implementing my subclass.
• Provide a new delegate for further use of the delegate: Allows someone to get the same things as the UITextFieldDelegate provides, but it still messes up the documentation and proper implementation of UITextField

Answer 1

Delegates in UIKit I normally one to one connections. Which can cause the problem you have described.

If you want multiple delegates of a UITextField I would derive a class from UITextField for example MYTextField and add a method to addDelegate and removeDelegate that maintains a list of delegates. The sent the MYTextField's delegate to itself and broadcast any delegate method to all listeners in the delegate array.

this post shows example code on how do maintain a list of multiple delegates.

Delegation to multiple objects