Hide the cursor of a UITextField

I am using a UITextField with a UIPickerView for its inputView, so that when the user taps the text field, a picker is summoned for them to select an option from.

Nearly everything works, but I have one problem: the cursor still flashes in the text field when it is active, which is ugly and inappropriate, since the user is not expected to type into the field and is not presented with a keyboard. I know I could hackily solve this by setting editing to NO on the text field and tracking touches on it, or by replacing it with a custom-styled button, and summoning the picker via code. However, I want to use the UITextFieldDelegate methods for all the event handling on the text field and hacks such as replacing the text field with a button do not permit this approach.

How can I simply hide the cursor on the UITextField instead?

Solution 1:

Simply subclass UITextField and override caretRectForPosition

- (CGRect)caretRectForPosition:(UITextPosition *)position
{
    return CGRectZero;
}

Solution 2:

As of iOS 7 you can now just set the tintColor = [UIColor clearColor] on the textField and the caret will disappear.

Solution 3:

You can just clear the textfield's tintColor

self.textField.tintColor = [UIColor clearColor];

Swift 3.0

self.textField.tintColor = .clear

Solution 4:

You might also want to stop the user from selecting, copying or pasting any text so that the only text input comes from the picker view.

- (CGRect) caretRectForPosition:(UITextPosition*) position
{
    return CGRectZero;
}

- (NSArray *)selectionRectsForRange:(UITextRange *)range
{
    return nil;
}

- (BOOL)canPerformAction:(SEL)action withSender:(id)sender
{
    if (action == @selector(copy:) || action == @selector(selectAll:) || action == @selector(paste:))
    {
        returnNO;
    }

    return [super canPerformAction:action withSender:sender];
}

http://b2cloud.com.au/tutorial/disabling-the-caret-and-text-entry-in-uitextfields/