How to disable touch input to all views except the top-most view?

Question

I have a view with multiple subviews. When a user taps a subview, the subview expands in size to cover most of the screen, but some of the other subviews are still visible underneath.

I want my app to ignore touches on the other subviews when one of the subviews is "expanded" like this. Is there a simple way to achieve this? I can write code to handle this, but I was hoping there's a simpler built-in way.

Answer 1

Hope this help...

[[yourSuperView subviews]
   makeObjectsPerformSelector:@selector(setUserInteractionEnabled:)
   withObject:[NSNumber numberWithBool:FALSE]];

which will disable userInteraction of a view's immediate subviews..Then give userInteraction to the only view you wanted

yourTouchableView.setUserInteraction = TRUE;

EDIT:

It seems in iOS disabling userInteraction on a parent view doesn't disable userInteraction on its childs.. So the code above (I mean the one with makeObjectsPerformSelector:)will only work to disable userInteraction of a parent's immediate subviews..

See user madewulf's answer which recursively get all subviews and disable user interaction of all of them. Or if you need to disable userInteraction of this view in many places in the project, You can categorize UIView to add that feature.. Something like this will do..

@interface UIView (UserInteractionFeatures)
-(void)setRecursiveUserInteraction:(BOOL)value;
@end

@implementation UIView(UserInteractionFeatures)
-(void)setRecursiveUserInteraction:(BOOL)value{
    self.userInteractionEnabled =   value;
    for (UIView *view in [self subviews]) {
        [view setRecursiveUserInteraction:value];
    }
}
@end

Now you can call

[yourSuperView setRecursiveUserInteraction:NO];

Also user @lxt's suggestion of adding an invisible view on top of all view's is one other way of doing it..