How to customize the callout bubble for MKAnnotationView?

Question

I'm currently working with the mapkit and am stuck.

I have a custom annotation view I am using, and I want to use the image property to display the point on the map with my own icon. I have this working fine. But what I would also like to do is to override the default callout view (the bubble that shows up with the title/subtitle when the annotation icon is touched). I want to be able to control the callout itself: the mapkit only provides access to the left and right ancillary callout views, but no way to provide a custom view for the callout bubble, or to give it zero size, or anything else.

My idea was to override selectAnnotation/deselectAnnotation in my MKMapViewDelegate, and then draw my own custom view by making a call to my custom annotation view. This works, but only when canShowCallout is set to YES in my custom annotation view class. These methods are NOT called if I have this set to NO (which is what I want, so that the default callout bubble is not drawn). So I have no way of knowing if the user touched on my point on the map (selected it) or touched a point that is not part of my annotation views (delected it) without having the default callout bubble view show up.

I tried going down a different path and just handling all touch events myself in the map, and I can't seem to get this working. I read other posts related to catching touch events in the map view, but they aren't exactly what I want. Is there a way to dig into the map view to remove the callout bubble before drawing? I'm at a loss.

Any suggestions? Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

There is an even easier solution.

Create a custom UIView (for your callout).

Then create a subclass of MKAnnotationView and override setSelected as follows:

- (void)setSelected:(BOOL)selected animated:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super setSelected:selected animated:animated];

    if(selected)
    {
        //Add your custom view to self...
    }
    else
    {
        //Remove your custom view...
    }
}

Boom, job done.