This post is part of my collection: Swift 2 – For Beginners.

In this example we will see how to add an annotation to our map when the user tap and hold.

Before we create annotations you should add a MapView to your application, you can see how to do it here.

To detect when the user tapped and hold on the screen we can use the recognizer: UILongPressGestureRecognizer. The next method adds a long press recognizer to our map.

It has 4 parameters:

• The map where the gesture recognized will be added.
• Target, the class that has the action to be executed.
• Action, the selector of the function that will be executed when the gesture is recognized.
• tapDuration, the time in seconds that the user has to hold the tap before the action is executed, by default 1 second.

    static func addOnUserTapAction(mapView mapView: MKMapView, target: AnyObject, action: Selector, tapDuration: Double = 1){
      
        // Adding a colon at the end of the selector we pass the recognizer that triggered the action to the action
        let longPressRecognizer = UILongPressGestureRecognizer(target: target, action: action)
        longPressRecognizer.minimumPressDuration = tapDuration
        
        // Add gesture recognizer to the map
        mapView.addGestureRecognizer(longPressRecognizer)
    }

Now we can use the method in our controller:

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        
        ...
        
        // Adding a colon at the end of the selector we pass the recognizer that triggered the action to the action
        MapHelper.addOnUserTapAction(mapView: map, target:self, action: "addAnnotation:")
    }

The method addAnnotation will be executed when our recognizer is fired, it will add an annotation to our map:

    func addAnnotation(gestureRecognizer:UIGestureRecognizer){
        print("add annotation")
        
        let location = MapHelper.getTappedLocation(mapView: self.map, gestureRecognizer: gestureRecognizer)
        
        // Add an annotation
        let annotation = MKPointAnnotation()
        annotation.coordinate = location;
        annotation.title = "You created this annotation!"
        map.addAnnotation(annotation)
    }
  

The last thing that we have to do is to write a method to get the coordinate in the map using the point on the screen where the user tapped:

    static func getTappedLocation(mapView mapView: MKMapView, gestureRecognizer: UIGestureRecognizer) -> CLLocationCoordinate2D{
        
        // Get the position on the screen where the user pressed, relative to the mapView
        let touchPoint = gestureRecognizer.locationInView(mapView)
        
        // Get location coordinate in map
        return mapView.convertPoint(touchPoint, toCoordinateFromView: mapView)
    }