I have an XCode project for the iPhone. The UI Hierarchy looks like this:
MainWindow
UINavigationController
RootView (derives from UIView)
NestedView1 (derives from UIView)
NestedView2 (derives from UIView)
This should be a typical setup for many projects. The app starts from RootView and as a result of some user action the RootView changes to NestedView1, then back to RootView, then to NestedView2.
Is there any way to set the title displayed in the Navigation Bar from within Interface Builder, as opposed to calling [self setTitle: #"Nested View X"]; from the code of each View Controller? What I'd like to have is opening a XIB of each of the View Controllers, selecting something visually and setting the title in the Inspector. Is this possible somehow?
Or maybe there is another approach not to have strings in the code for better localization?
Apple have many resources available on how to localise your apps, there is a directory of them here.
In particular, read this bit about localising strings.
click on the RootView in the interface builder you will find a navigation item component in the RootView, click on that component and you will find in the "Attribute Inspector" window a title field, write there the title that you want.
Related
I am working to create a custom view for an iPhone app I'm creating. This custom view is a Popover dialog which is made up of a UIView which contains two images, a button to close the dialog, a label, and a UIScrollView. This view is named MDPopoverCard. I have these files as a part of my view:
MDPopoverCard.xib - The view as drawn up in Interface Builder.
MDPopoverCard.h - Defines a few IBActions and some other properties
MDPopoverCard.m - Implements some functions defined in the header
This is what it looks like in Interface Builder: http://cl.ly/2B0f2x3s1w1i0K2G0Q1r (sorry, I can't post an image yet as I'm new to stackoverflow)
There are a few properties defined in my .m and .h files that control whether the green button is displayed and what the text of the title label is.
I need to display a number of these dialogs in my app and I'd like to reuse this interface I've designed. I want to be able to add buttons and other form elements into the UIScrollView via Interface Builder. However, I have a problem:
Imagine that I have another view I'm drawing up in Interface Builder. I add a UIView to it and set its class to MDPopoverCard. I then drag a couple UIButton objects into my MDPopoverCard view. Here's an example of what it looks like in Interface Builder:
http://cl.ly/1X090h1t1q3f0i3E0917
This screenshot shows another view (the root view) that I've added my MDPopoverCard to. I've then added two buttons as subviews of MDPopoverCard.
These buttons do get properly nested in Interface Builder. However, when I run my app these buttons are added before any of the items that make up my MDPopoverCard view in the xib file. This means that the buttons are being added behind my popover dialog. That's the first problem.
The second problem is that I want these buttons and form elements to actually be added into the UIScrollView that's contained within the MDPopoverCard view, and not just right into the UIView's subviews array. Is there a way to specify this in Interface Builder? I'd really much rather draw buttons into my UIView and connect them to IBActions via Interface Builder than hand write every instance of these dialogs that I may need to display (several).
Any advice? Is there anything I can do to clarify the question?
Thanks for your help!
Formerly Xcode supported user-defined IB plugins for custom UI elements which you could just drag and drop into the XIBs the same way you do with built-in widgets. As of Xcode 4 this nice feature has been removed. (Thanks a lot, Apple.)
Currently I can only think of a hacky way to achieve what you described. What I would do is the following:
create an IBOutletCollection on your MDPopoverCard, e.g. embeddedControls
link it with every UI element (here: the buttons) you want to go inside the scroll view
implement the awakeFromNib in MDPopoverCard and explicitly reset the superview of all the views in embeddedControls to the scroll view in there
Hope this helps (although I haven't tried).
I have a simple iOS 5 storyboard that contains a tableview controller scene. However, the table UI takes up 100% of the real estate and I am unable to add any additional objects such as a title bar. Any object that I drag to the scene will try to size correctly and what-not but as soon as I let go it will not add the object. What am I doing wrong?
If all you want is a title bar, then it looks like you want to embed your table view controller in a navigation controller. You can do this by selecting your table view controller and using the Editor: Embed In: Navigation Controller menu command. Once you do this, you should have a navigation bar, and you can double click it to edit the title.
If you need arbitrary UI elements along with your table view, then I think you need to use a plain UIViewController scene instead of a UITableViewController, and manually drag a UITableView into the scene. Your view controller would not subclass UITableViewController, instead it would subclass UIViewController and implement the UITableViewControllerDelegate and UITableViewControllerDataSource protocols. Also, you would need to manually wire up the delegate and dataSource outlets by ctrl-dragging from the table view to your view controller in interface builder, and your view controller would need a custom tableView outlet that points to the UITableView and is correctly wired up in IB. Perhaps there is a simpler approach than this though, if someone has a better suggestion that would be great to hear.
I'm currently creating an ipad application.
the idea is to have a toolbar at the top and a tabbar at the bottom.
The toolbar has to be visible on all tabs, so it won't disappear.
I was thinking about having a UIViewController as the main view and put the tool bar in there.
Then adding the uitabbarcontroller to that main view controller, but i'm not sure how to do that.
At the moment i have my tabbarcontroller as the main view and added the toolbar to every tab.
Can anyone help?
Thanks
The Tab Bar Controller should be at the root. What you can do is create a method that returns a propertly configured toolbar & add it to each of the view controller's viewDidLoad (either by using a category method, inheriting a common UIViewController subclass, or simply via a C-style factory method.
This way your hierarchy isn't flipped, and the tab bar is at the root like it should be.
I'm running into a problem with an iPad app where I would like to have UINavigationControllers in both of the views within a UISplitView. I've looked through other similar questions here, but most link to a tutorial online that doesn't completely solve the problem. Here's a 2-minute walkthrough to re-create the problem I'm having:
Create a New Project in XCode, starting from the Split View-based Application template.
Add the following NSLog statement as the first line within the DetailViewController's willHideViewController method:
NSLog(#"toolbar: %#", toolbar);
If you run the application now, the log will show that the DetailViewController's toolbar is alive and well. Now...
Open MainWindow.xib and expand the SplitViewController.
Drag a Navigation Controller from the library on top of the DetailViewController.
Expand the new Navigation Controller and change the class of the UIViewController within to a DetailViewController.
Ctrl-drag from the SplitViewController to the DetailViewController and assign it as the delegate.
Save MainWindow.xib and run the app again.
At this point, the detail view has a navigation bar and an empty toolbar. If you view the logs, you should find that the toolbar is null. Why is this? Am I missing some sort of connection in Interface Builder? Is the navigation bar the problem for some reason?
Unlike the tutorial at http://www.cimgf.com/2010/05/24/fixing-the-uisplitviewcontroller-template/, I would like to keep both the navigation bar and the toolbar (preferably with the toolbar at the top when in portrait and not visible when in landscape), so that I still have a functional "Back" button when the iPad is in portrait orientation.
Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this problem? An example project with this sort of set-up would be ideal.
You can certainly use a navigation controller on the detail view of a split view controller. In fact, the iPad Settings app uses this approach. Probably the best way to get this setup is to create a new project in Xcode 4.x and select the "Master-Detail Application" template. It will generate a split view controller with 2 navigation controllers, one for the left view and one for the right view.
To your toolbar question, to keep things simple I would put a toolbar in the bottom. You can still put bar button items on the top navigation bar, although you can only put them in the left, middle, or right. If you need lots of items on the top bar, one way is to add a toolbar to the detail view and hide the navigation bar in the viewWillAppear event of the detail view class.
Here is an example on how to hide the navigation bar and show the toolbar:
- (void) viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated {
[super viewWillAppear:animated];
self.navigationController.toolbarHidden = NO;
self.navigationController.navigationBarHidden = YES;
}
I've found the built-in UISplitViewController to behave badly when trying to combine it with most of the other built-in view controller subclasses. Matt Gemmell's MGSplitViewController is a lot more flexible and has worked pretty well for me, despite the odd glitches (though those are at least fixable as the source code is provided).
In iPhone OS 3.0, you can set the toolbar items of a UINavigationController using the setToolbarItems:animated: method. However, this requires you pass in an array of UIToolbarItems. While I could programmatically create these toolbar items, I'd rather create them in Interface Builder if possible.
With this in mind, I have created a UIToolbar in "MyGreatViewController.xib" and have populated it with the wanted toolbar items. Then, in "MyGreatViewController.m", I get the items from the toolbar and pass them to setToolbarItems:animated::
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
[self setToolbarItems: [toolbar items]];
}
...where toolbar is an IBOutlet referring to the UIToolbar.
Is this a good approach? Is there a better way to accomplish this? Should I just create the items programmatically?
I don't know if this is documented anywhere, but I've found that in Interface Builder, if you enable the navigation controller's toolbar, you can drag bar items to your view controller, and they will automagically show up in the navigation controller's toolbar.
For example, here's what we can do (using Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard):
File->New Project.... Choose Navigation-based Application and create the project.
Open MainWindow.xib in Interface Builder.
Select the Navigation Controller, and in the Attributes inspector, check the "Shows Toolbar" box. This will cause a Toolbar object to appear.
Drag a Bar Button Item from the Library to the toolbar. It will appear in the toolbar. If you check the hierarchy in the NIB, you'll see that this new item is a child of the RootViewController.
It seems that any Bar Button Items added as children of the navigation item will show up in the navigation bar, and any Bar Button Items added as children of the view controller will show up in the toolbar.
(I stumbled on this by accident. If anyone can find documentation for this behavior, or any additional info, I'd like to hear about it.)
It's a perfectly acceptable way of doing it, but do bear in mind that loading xib files is quite expensive on the iPhone, and it may well be faster to create the toolbar items programatically in your viewDidLoad method.