iOS adding tapGesture to multiple Views

  1. Can you attach a UIGestureRecognizer to multiple views? No.

  2. Two options:

    a) Give every UIGestureRecognizer its own action. Pluses of this approach: strong decoupling. Minuses: more code reuse. But, you can mitigate code reuse by creating methods for common functionalities and just call the methods in the different actions.

    b) Give every view to which you add a UIGestureRecognizer a unique tag. Then, use a switch statement in the common action with the sender's view's tag as the case. Pluses: less code reuse. Minuses: tighter coupling. Something like this:

    UIGestureRecognizer *singleTap = [[UIGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(singleTapAction:)];
    [feedsView addGestureRecognizer:singleTap];
    feedsView.tag = 33;
    

    Then:

    - (void)singleTapAction:(UIGestureRecognizer *)singleTap {
        UIView *view = singleTap.view;
        switch (view.tag) {
            case 33
                // view is feedsView
                break;
    
            default:
                break;
        }
    }
    

    Although it's usually best to go with the option that decouples, if all of your actions are very similar, which seems to be the case here, and you are quite sure that they'll remain very similar in the future, then option b) with the tags is probably the better choice.

P.S. It's unnecessary to explicitly set numberOfTapsRequired & numberOfTouchesRequired to 1 since they're both set to 1 by default. You can confirm this by holding Command and clicking on numberOfTapsRequired in Xcode.


I had the same problem where it only added to the last view. There might be a better solution, but I just created a tag gesture for each view and linked them to the same selector method (oneTap: in your case). In order to distinguish which view activated the method, you can just tag your views, feedsView.tag = 0; peopleView.tag = 1; and so on. Then when the method is called:

- (void)oneTap:(UIGestureRecognizer *)gesture {
    int myViewTag = gesture.view.tag;  // now you know which view called
    // use myViewTag to specify individual actions;
}