UISearchBar text color change in iOS 7

Gaurang picture Gaurang · Sep 27, 2013 · Viewed 48.6k times · Source

How to change text color of UISearchBar in iOS 7?

In iOS 6, I was subclassing the UISearchBar and in layoutSubviews customising the properties of UITextField subview of UISearchBar.

But in iOS 7, UISearchBar doesn't have UITextField as its subview. How to fix this?

Answer

Toseef Khilji picture Toseef Khilji · Sep 27, 2013

In iOS 7 to access Text Field you have to reiterate on level more. Change your code like this

for (UIView *subView in self.searchBar.subviews)
{
    for (UIView *secondLevelSubview in subView.subviews){
        if ([secondLevelSubview isKindOfClass:[UITextField class]])
        {
            UITextField *searchBarTextField = (UITextField *)secondLevelSubview;

            //set font color here
            searchBarTextField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor];

            break;
        }
    }
}

Note : This is Not Public API

OR

You can use appearance Property of UIControls, Like

[[UITextField appearanceWhenContainedIn:[UISearchBar class], nil] setDefaultTextAttributes:@{NSForegroundColorAttributeName:[UIColor redColor]}];

Note: Appearance proxy can be used for iOS 9.0+ OutPut

enter image description here

You can set The tintcolor to apply to key elements in the search bar.

Use tintColor to tint foreground elements.

Use barTintColor to tint the bar background.

In iOS v7.0, all subclasses of UIView derive their behavior for tintColor from the base class. See the discussion of tintColor at the UIView level for more information. Apple Doc