Getting a particular superview in Objective-C

If you have, for example, a child view of a UITableViewCell and you need to get the UITableViewCell in question you can quickly do something like:

UITableViewCell *cell = (UITableViewCell *)the_view.superview.superview;

It works but this code is fragile because it requires that the view heirarchy not change (also things like this usually point to a code organization issue but hey, i’m not here to judge). If we want to be able to add a scrollview in between without editing this method we’ll have to take a different approach.

// Add a category on UIView
-(UIView *)parents:(Class)class_name {
    UIView *s = self.superview;
    while (![s isKindOfClass:class_name]) {
        if (s.superview) {
            s = s.superview;
        } else {
            return nil;
        }
    }

    return s;
}

// Call the category on the_view and pass it the class that we're looking for.  It'll return the first superview that's that kind of class.
UITableViewCell *cell = (UITableViewCell *)[the_view parents:[UITableViewCell class]];

I named the category after jQuery’s parents method ( http://api.jquery.com/parents/) but call it what you want.