I'm creating an iPad app based on a UINavigationController (with the bar hidden) so I can push and pop other viewControllers for navigation around the app. However, I am now wanting to add a section in which there are two viewControllers that I want to be able to switch between, so in other words they are side-by-side, rather than hierarchical.
Is it okay to use a UITabBarController for this? I am aware that on the iPhone it is recommended they are used only at the root level of the app, but since this is an iPad app I wondered if I could use it? Also, I guess I need to create an empty viewController, create a UITabBarController within it and set the delegate to it, then add the two viewControllers to it... So in effect I will have a viewController within another viewController, and when I have done that in the past the results have been very flaky.
Can I do it this way? The only other way I can think of doing it is to have two plan UIViews within a UIViewController, but that also means I shouldn't really put any business logic in them (bad MVC!), and not being able to will be a right pain in the a**.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
:-Joe
EDIT: I also need to be able to swipe-animate between the two VCs within the TabBarController, AND have a menubar over the top which doesn't animate... Can I do this?
Sure.
I do this kind of thing all over the place in an app I'm working on. I actually have several different types of "toolbars" that can be optionally shown at different times.
What I do is create a "parent" member in my toolbar's class - and when a button is pressed, I have the toolbar call a method in the parent class to do whatever needs to be done - (i.e. display another view).
This avoids the whole mess of creating a view inside another view (or viewcontroller inside another viewcontroller - or whatever) - the toolbar can take the button hits, but all the views are opened by the root view/controller.
Hope this helps/makes sense!
Related
Lets say I have a scene which includes a UIView container on the top half of the screen, and a UIView container on the bottom half of the screen and a few buttons at the very bottom of the screen.
Basically the bottom container will always display static text while the buttons across the bottom will change the content of the top container which may include an image, more buttons, or more text depending on what button is pressed on the bottom. Also each time a bottom button is pressed the top container is transitioned to the new view with a flip from bottom transition.
I have achieved this purely programmatically, but decided to convert my app to a storyboard file since it makes producing the rest of my app much faster and simpler, plus makes the code not look like a crazy mess.
My limited understanding of storyboards seems to deduce that I would need a separate story board scene for every UIView change, and Apple's coding conventions with storyboards seem to imply that we should use a new ViewController every time you create a new scene. All this adds up to an even bigger mess than I currently have.
Is there a better way of doing this? Am I misunderstanding something? If I am not confused, is there some way to make all these scene and view controller duplication cleaner?
The storyboard editor makes it difficult to do what you're describing, because it doesn't let you edit freestanding views associated with a scene.
I suggest you just create a separate nib (not storyboard) for each of the top-half views. These can exist separate from your storyboard. Your view controller (which is instantiated from the storyboard) can then load whichever nib it needs when a button is pressed, and put the view from the nib into its (the view controller's) top-level view.
There must be a way!
I accidentally opened one one day (see attached image). Although I have no idea how I did it and really really want to know, I cannot reproduce it, nor close it. The UIView opened when I was dragging my connection for the table header view from the Connections Inspector to the list of controls on the left side of the screen (not to the actual UIViewController).
I too am reworking a project with storyboards and have a similar problem with multiple views per UIViewController.
In this case it is a table header. I have other UIViewControllers in the project with the same configuration but I cannot get them to pop up either.
Just as a disclaimer, I am an iOS beginner, in a pretty unique position. I'm an intern learning on the job, with a hard deadline for a test app, with specific specs. So I unfortunately don't have the luxury of learning all that I should about xCode and objective C.
Anyways, I am trying to create a navigation menu similar to the iPad's slide out menu. I've looked at plenty of sample code given in response to questions like this in the past. It all works perfectly fine, but I can't understand all of what they're doing. I think this results from being fairly bewildered by view controllers and delegates. And, since I'm supposed to be writing this all by myself, I can't just build off of their existing code.
My plan for this working is to have one main view controller, containing the navigation menu in a table view. This is hidden behind a normal UIView, until a button is pressed, at which point the normal UIView slides offscreen enough to reveal the menu. Upon selection of a menu item, the normal UIView would slide back to its original position, and be replaced by the relevant UIView, controlled by its view controller. In other words, clicking on the menu item relating to "Home" would load the homeViewController.xib, controlled by the homeViewController. This would be loaded in that normal UIView subview, on top of the tableView.
I'm able to load a view in that normal UIView as a result of a button press.
homeViewController *_homeViewController = [[homeViewController alloc]initWithNibName:#"homeViewController"];
[self frontView] = _homeViewController.view;
There may be some syntax errors in that code, since its from memory. I'm not able to access the computer with my code on it at the moment, but that's the general gist. Basically, that places the home view nib on the frontView (that normal UIView that's over the table view), but its not connected to homeViewController. Or at least I think that's the issue, when I press a button, that's correctly connected between the nib and the homeViewController.h, and only set to NSLog in the .m file, the application crashes.
Any idea how to connect this nib to its viewController when displayed in this way? Or, to create the nib in IB, without the associated .h and .m files, and use the main view controller as the homeViewController as well? Or, if my logic is inherently flawed, what SHOULD I do? Something with NavigationControllers?
EDIT:
I also tried a new approach- changing homeViewController's file owner to viewController, and connecting the button on homeViewController's action to viewController. This too caused a crash upon pressing the button. I really think the issue is with having multiple view controllers acting on screen at once, or having multiple views from separate nibs, controlled by one view controller on screen at once.
I suspect that your immediate problem is that _homeViewController is being freed as soon as you leave whatever method that code is in. To fix this, create a strong property in this class that holds the _homeViewController for as long as its view is needed and allocate it to that property rather than a local variable. That way, buttons (or whatever) that are part of that view still have a valid controller object backing them.
In the long run, pushing or presenting view controllers when you need the screen to change is a much better strategy but, as I said, the immediate problem.... :)
I am a newbie in all this as will be apparent really soon.
I am using the iOS: Application: Tabbed application template. I have placed a UIImageView in the first view and two standard rounded buttons. One button is attached to an action in the FirstView Controller which places a picture into the UIImageView. The second button is attached to an action in the AppDelegate which calls a method in the FirstViewController which in turn places a second picture into the UIImageView.
The AppDelegate method does not replace the picture. It doesn't crash… it just does not seem to do anything.
How can I manipulate the view in the First and Second View Controller from the AppDelegate?
#dasdom
Well that's one issue explained. I've been reading the theory of MVC and trying to put it into practice now. Short version is I am trying to write a Battleship app for practice. Was planning on using the first screen to setup the game pieces, prefs, etc.. and use the second screen for actual game play.
I've created another class to use as my "brain center" but I ran into the same issue of not being able to manipulate anything on the screen for the first or second views. (That's why I tried the appDelegate).
That's my life story right now… can you throw some pointers my way on how to proceed and how to solve my one of many problems?
First you shouldn't do that. The AppDelegate should only be responsible for bringing the first view onto the screen.
Second you should have a look into the Model-View-Controller design pattern. Search for it in your preferred search machine.
But I you really still want to do that you should have a look into delegation and/or notifications. For example you could send the First View Controller a notification from the AppDelegate to change the image.
Quite possibly I'm missing something obvious, but I have a very simple requirement and neither of these two seems to meet it.
I have an application with 3 distinct views, however for reasons I won't go into here (essentially views may or may not be valid depending in what is done in other views), using persistant tabs as navigation will not work. I also want each view to be created as needed and UITabBarController creates all its views upfront. However I still want some of the functionality of UITabBarController - being able to pass it in an Array of UIViewControllers.
UINavigationController offers the chance to have it create its views as needed, but there is no way for me to pass a list of views to it up front, so I end up with ViewControllers creating and pushing other (sibling) ViewControllers which is nasty.
So here are my requirements:
I want to be able to add ViewControllers upfront
I want to be able to navigate between the view controllers
I want each ViewController to be created as needed and destroyed when navigated away from
Is there anything that fits the bill?
I would use the AppDelegate to create a hash of viewcontrollers upfront and create a navigation controller.
Once you click the button to navigate to a new viewcontroller you can go to the hash and look for that specific view controller. If it is not created you can create it there. If you want to destroy that view controller just release it and remove from the hash.
I'm trying to put an iAd banner in an app that is based on a UINavigationController (it's not the standard nav-base app proposed by xcode, cause I don't need the table view).
I'd like to place an ADBanner on its bottom, to be always visible, no matter how the user pops and pushes views.
I studied the iAdSuite example in the apple sample code, but, though it's reported among the "best practices", I don't think it's the best practice for what I need. It basically declares an ADBannerView in the app delegate class and then implements the ADBannerViewDelegate methods for every single view the app needs. That means implementing the ADBannerViewDelegate methods over and over again on every view controller class you need! It doesn't seem too smart... :(
I'd rather prefer to have an approach more similar to what Apple itself does in the tab bar based app, where you have a part of the window always occupied by the tab controller and all the views switching above without affecting the tab bar view below.
You can't directly put an ADBannerView along with the nav controller in the app delegate, because ADBanner needs to be placed in a view controller (you get a runtime error otherwise).
I tried to subclass from UIViewController, implementing the ADBannerViewDelegate in this class, and place it in the rootViewController along with a UINavigationController but I'm not having good luck with this approach...
Has anybody found a good, simple way to to this? Any hint?
Thank you for any help...
You can have just one class for ADBannerViewDelegate, and just one instance of ADBanner itself. When the currently active view changes, remove ADBanner from the old view, add it as a subview to the new view.
EDIT:
to clarify, you don't need each view implement the ADBannerViewDelegate. You only should have one class implement it (that class doesn't have to be a view controller for that matter).
You would also need to maintain a somewhere a property that would point to the currently active view (e.g. you can update that property in your Navigation Controller's navigationController:didShowViewController:animated:, or come up with your own protocol for that if your views appear in a more complex way).
Then in your ADBannerViewDelegate you'd just resize the view currently pointed to by that current view property. The actual view doesn't even have to know it has an ad in it ;)