Disable gesture to pull down form/page sheet modal presentation

Question

In iOS 13 modal presentations using the form and page sheet style can be dismissed with a pan down gesture. This is problematic in one of my form sheets because the user draws into this box which interferes with the gesture. It pulls the screen down instead of drawing a vertical line.

How can you disable the vertical swipe to dismiss gesture in a modal view controller presented as a sheet?

Setting isModalInPresentation = true still allows the sheet to be pulled down, it just won't dismiss.

Answer 1

In general, you shouldn't try to disable the swipe to dismiss functionality, as users expect all form/page sheets to behave the same across all apps. Instead, you may want to consider using a full-screen presentation style. If you do want to use a sheet that can't be dismissed via swipe, set isModalInPresentation = true, but note this still allows the sheet to be pulled down vertically and it'll bounce back up upon releasing the touch. Check out the UIAdaptivePresentationControllerDelegate documentation to react when the user tries to dismiss it via swipe, among other actions.

If you have a scenario where your app's gesture or touch handling is impacted by the swipe to dismiss feature, I did receive some advice from an Apple engineer on how to fix that.

If you can prevent the system's pan gesture recognizer from beginning, this will prevent the gestural dismissal. A few ways to do this:

1. If your canvas drawing is done with a gesture recognizer, such as your own UIGestureRecognizer subclass, enter the began phase before the sheet’s dismiss gesture does. If you recognize as quickly as UIPanGestureRecognizer, you will win, and the sheet’s dismiss gesture will be subverted.

2. If your canvas drawing is done with a gesture recognizer, setup a dynamic failure requirement with -shouldBeRequiredToFailByGestureRecognizer: (or the related delegate method), where you return NO if the passed in gesture recognizer is a UIPanGestureRecognizer.

3. If your canvas drawing is done with manual touch handling (e.g. touchesBegan:), override -gestureRecognizerShouldBegin on your touch handling view, and return NO if the passed in gesture recognizer is a UIPanGestureRecognizer.

With my setup #3 proved to work very well. This allows the user to swipe down anywhere outside of the drawing canvas to dismiss (like the nav bar), while allowing the user to draw without moving the sheet, just as one would expect.

I cannot recommend trying to find the gesture to disable it, as it seems to be rather dynamic and can reenable itself when switching between different size classes for example, and this could change in future releases.