UITextField cannot resign its keyboard when inside UINavigationItem

Question

So I am implementing a custom navigation item in my view controller via the method like this

-(UINavigationItem*)navigationItem{
    item = [[SearchNavigationItem alloc] init];
    item.delegate = self;
    return item;
}

The SearchNavigationItem will set itself up, add a UITextField and so on.

The field.delegate will have the item as the delegate.

So the issue I have is that when I try to grab the text of the field, it is nil. But when the "textfield changed" is called, I can access the field via the argument (textFieldDidChange:UITextField*) and it has the text.

Another issue, like the title, was that when I did [field resignFirstResponder] nothing happened.

Answer 1

Okay so I already have the answer, and I am writing this question because I could personally not find any help while fixing it.

---

So the issue is that navigationItem can be called multiple times and this kept creating new bars.

So the solution became, simply, this:

-(UINavigationItem*)navigationItem{
    // Apparently it should be treated as a 'singleton' which I think it says
    // kind of in the documentation. This comment is just to reinforce that
    // it burned me to init it each time this method is called. Which is can
    // be multiple times and also outside of the class itself (like when nav'ing)
    if(item == nil){
        item = [[SearchNavigationItem alloc] init];
        item.delegate = self;
    }
    return item;
}

Hope this helps someone else.