“Invisible Container” – HSPassthroughView

I’d like to revisit an older post which deals with allowing subviews in a view hierarchy to be touchable, but making the parent view completely “non-interactive”.

Sometimes you need a ‘container view’ that can simplify Autolayout Constraint animations.  You want the view to be ‘invisible’ whilst allowing its subviews to behave normally. Being invisible, you may also want to tell it to inherit it’s superview’s color, so to reduce the need for layer blending (better performance)

I present the updated HSPassthroughView:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

IB_DESIGNABLE
@interface HSPassthroughView : UIView

@property (nonatomic, assign) IBInspectable BOOL inheritsBackgroundColor;  // defaults to NO

@end

@implementation HSPassthroughView

- (UIView*)hitTest:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    UIView *view = [super hitTest:point withEvent:event];
    if (view == self)
    {
        NSLog(@"A view was asked for a view, but this is a QLPassthroughView.  If you see this message but expect a touch to be found, look here.");
        return nil;
    }   
    return view;  //ensure this view will never register a touch!
}
- (void)awakeFromNib
{   
    if (self.inheritsBackgroundColor && self.superview) {
        self.backgroundColor = self.superview.backgroundColor;
    }
}
- (void)willMoveToSuperview:(UIView *)newSuperview
{
    if (self.inheritsBackgroundColor) {
        self.backgroundColor = newSuperview.backgroundColor;
    }
    [super willMoveToSuperview:newSuperview];
}
@end

This helped solve a problem I had that was on StackOverflow.