Styling the cancel button in a UISearchBar

Question

I have a UISearchBar that has a cancel button (it's displayed using -(void)setShowsCancelButton:animated). I've changed the tintColor of the search bar like this in an attempt to get a grayish searchbar:

UISearchBar *searchBar = [[UISearchBar alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 40)];
searchBar.tintColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0.8 alpha:1.0];

This is what it looks like now - notice how the cancel button is also gray: http://twitpic.com/c0hte

Is there a way to set the color of the cancel button separately so it looks more like this: http://twitpic.com/c0i6q

Answer 1

You can use UIAppearance to style the cancel button without iterating subviews of the UISearchBar, but the UIButton header does not currently have any methods annotated with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR.

EDIT: Drill down the subviews till you get that cancel button

But this usually returns nil until searchBar.setShowsCancelButton(true, animated: true) is called.

extension UISearchBar {

var cancelButton : UIButton? {
    if let view = self.subviews.first {
        for subView in view.subviews {
            if let cancelButton = subView as? UIButton {
                return cancelButton
            }
        }
    }
    return nil
}
}