UIControl track touches outside its view

Question

I'm building a menu as a subclass of UIControl that opens when a user touches it and will close if a user doesn't choose one of its options.

I'm looking for a way to track when a user touches outside so that I can close the menu

Answer 1

Put one view behind your menu that cover whole area of your device with background of clear color. when your menu is open make that view visible. as it has same height and width as your device whenever you click outside the menu you can identify that view using TapGesture or make it UIControl. than call method to hide both your menu and that uiview.

Hope this will help.

Answer 2

What I really like to do is to make a big button that covers the entire view, and have it below the menu, or whatever else I want to touch away from and have something happen.

    UIButton *bigBackButton = [[UIButton alloc]initWithFrame:self.view.frame];
    [bigBackButton addTarget:self action:@selector(backButtonSelected) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchDown];
    [bigBackButton setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0 green:0 blue:0 alpha:0.5]];
    [self.view addSubview:bigBackButton];

}
- (void)backButtonSelected:(UIButton *)button {
    //get rid of the button
    [button removeFromSuperview];

    //do whatever else you need to do
    [yourmenu dosomething];
}

on some apps, I'll make the button dark and translucent to highlight the menu, whatever else. Other times I'll make it pretty much invisible, like [UIColor colorWithWhite:1.0 alpha:0.01];

in your menu routine you could add these same routines. You could pass the frame of the parent view, or just look it up in the layoutSubviews routine, if your menu is a sublcass of a UIView.

in your layoutSubviews, add this:

    UIButton *bigBackButton = [[UIButton alloc]initWithFrame:self.superview.frame];
    [bigBackButton addTarget:self action:@selector(backButtonSelected) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchDown];
    [bigBackButton setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0 green:0 blue:0 alpha:0.5]];
    [self.view addSubview:bigBackButton];

and then put the backButtonSelected method in your menu class as well.