Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

Table View Menus

It is possible to display a menu from a table view cell by performing a long press on the cell. A menu, in iOS, is a sort of balloon containing tappable words such as Copy, Cut, and Paste. And as far as I can tell, those are the only words you’ll be including in a table view cell’s menu; I tried to customize the menu to include other terms, but I failed.

To allow the user to display a menu from a table view’s cells, you implement three delegate methods:

tableView:shouldShowMenuForRowAtIndexPath:

Return YES if the user is to be permitted to summon a menu by performing a long press on this cell.

tableView:canPerformAction:forRowAtIndexPath:withSender:

You’ll be called repeatedly with a bunch of selectors for various actions that the system knows about, but as far as I can tell, the only ones worth responding YES to are cut:, copy:, and paste:. Whichever ones you respond YES to will appear in the menu; returning YES, regardless, causes all three menu items to appear in the menu. The menu will now appear unless you return NO to all three actions. The sender is the shared UIMenuController, which I’ll discuss more in Chapter 23 and Chapter 39.

tableView:performAction:forRowAtIndexPath:withSender:

The user has tapped one of the menu items; your job is to respond to it somehow.

Here’s an example where the user can summon a Copy menu from any cell (Figure 21-10):

- (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView shouldShowMenuForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { return ...