How to get touch event on a CALayer?

Alex Lowe picture Alex Lowe · Feb 21, 2009 · Viewed 16.5k times · Source

I'm new to the iPhone SDK. Right now I'm programming with CALayers which I really like a lot – not as expensive as UIViews, and a lot less code than OpenGL ES sprites.

I have this question: is it possible to get a touch event on a CALayer? I understand how to get a touch event on a UIView with

-(void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event 

but I can't find anywhere about how to get a touch event on a CALayer object, for instance, an orange square floating in 3D space. I refuse to believe I'm the only one who's curious about this.

I appreciate any help!

Answer

Alex Lowe picture Alex Lowe · Feb 21, 2009

ok- answered my own question! let's say you've got a bunch of CALayers in your view controller's main layer, and you want them to go to opacity 0.5 when you touch them. implement this code in the .m file of your view controller class:

-(void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    if ([touches count] == 1) {
        for (UITouch *touch in touches) {
            CGPoint point = [touch locationInView:[touch view]];
            point = [[touch view] convertPoint:point toView:nil];

            CALayer *layer = [(CALayer *)self.view.layer.presentationLayer hitTest:point];

            layer = layer.modelLayer;
            layer.opacity = 0.5;
        }
    }
}