I have a UIWebView which shows static content and reacts to various swipe gestures through its controller.

The text selection has been disabled but now I am working on a new feature to allow text selection and present a custom context menu.

Now I need to be able to detect when the text selection is active so that I can turn off the swipe gestures.

The only method I can think of is to check if there is selected text using JS in the swipe handler methods. Any other ideas? Does anybody know how to do this better?

Thanks.

I have a UIWebView which shows static content and reacts to various swipe gestures through its controller.

The text selection has been disabled but now I am working on a new feature to allow text selection and present a custom context menu.

Now I need to be able to detect when the text selection is active so that I can turn off the swipe gestures.

The only method I can think of is to check if there is selected text using JS in the swipe handler methods. Any other ideas? Does anybody know how to do this better?

Thanks.

• javascript
• ios
• uiwebview

3 Answers 3

when the user select a text the menuViewController will shown up .. you can detect that by add a notification on your viewController

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(menuShown) name:UIMenuControllerDidShowMenuNotification object:nil];

same case to detect for the menu hide.

You may be able to use a "Long Press Gesture Recognizer" to bind to the UIWebView. You can calibrate it to the timing required for a user to press and hold on a text before the text is selected.

I ended up using the following method to disable and enable the gesture recognizers using the Rangy library. Works great.

- (BOOL) isSelectionActive
{
    NSString * resultStr = [self.contentView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:
                            @"rangy.getSelection().isCollapsed"];

    NSLog(@"resultStr: %@", resultStr );

    if ([resultStr isEqualToString:@"true"]) {
        return NO;
    }
    else {
        return YES;
    }
}