Let's say my main view controller will be a tab bar with misc sub view controllers (i.e the first will be navigation controller, the second will a subclass of uiviewcontroller, etc)
Now I want to add a static header view (will contain at least a logo uiimageview like websites)
so what is the best practice to achieve this?
EDIT: As Mark Adams explains in the comments, below, this is not a good strategy. I'll leave it as an note on what not to do.
"Best practice" is a dicey term, but what immediately comes to mind for me is to make your UITabBarController the root and only view controller of a parent UINavigationController. Then you can put whatever logo UIImageView you like in the navigation bar.
If you're not going for a UINavigationBar style, then I would recommend subclassing UIView and creating your custom view and using a simple implementation and offset value to add it to each of your UIViewControllers. Its a hassle, but it avoids having to throw on unnecessary UINavigationControllers to your project.
As for best practice, you should alway keep the UITabBarController as the root of your window, rather than having a UINavigationController with a UITabBarController as a root.
Also, I do appreciate the other poster's name.
Related
I have implemented Facebook type left Slide Bar layout in my first view of iphone app. Now, I want to implement this throughout all view controllers (screens) in application, means irrespective of the view the left slide bar should appear on clicking the menu button at the top in all views.
My app contains 25-30 viewcontrollers and my slide bar layout should appear in all views..
Can anyone suggest, how can I include above FB Layout in all views
Thanks in advance
Ramu
Simple, The one view controller in which you have implemented the FB layout and is working. Make it the base class on top of UIViewController. And as for the rest of all the ViewControllers, inherit them from the MasterClass that you just created. Doing this will make the swipe gesture that brings forth the slide bar available to all of your 30 view controllers.
EDIT
Lets see, we have UIViewController, now first of all you create a UIViewController's subclass: say FBViewController ..In this FBViewController you implement the FBLayout such that the swipe and all is working ..on it ..test your app first using only this FBViewController as rootViewController and check all the functionalities.Once everything is working fine, grow on it. What I mean is this.
Say you are creating a Tabbed application, where all the three tabs are supposed to have the same FBLayout style. Then do these steps.
Create FBViewController, it inherits from UIViewController (using UIViewController subclass template, also check the generate XIB button) also have an XIB for it FBViewController.XIB (fully implement FBLayout in it. This will be your base class)
Then Create three more ViewController classes (FirstViewController, SecondViewController, ThirdViewController) again from the UIViewController subclass template, but for these three dont check the generate XIB button. these three will use the XIB of the base class FBViewController (If you are wondering how, then go to step 3 :))
Go to header file of FirstViewController class you created, there you can see #interface FirstViewController: UIViewController replace it with #interface FirstViewController: FBViewController, but before it import FBViewController.h to the header file. Repeat the same for the Other two classes- SecondViewController, ThirdViewController. Since these three will inherit from FBViewController. In their viewDidLoad [super viewDidLoad] will load FBViewController and generate the view. after [super viewDidLoad]; line you can implement ur own methods.
In the three classes just change the initWithNibName method to change the tab bar name and title.
In appDelegate go to didFinishLaunching method and put these three view controller in a tabBarController, set the tabBarController as rootViewController.
And we are done. If your FBViewController is working fine. You will see that all the three classes behave the same way. Thanx to the power of Inheritance.
Cheers, play a bit, have fun.
I had the same problem. I was using a facebook-style menu, and needed it in all view controllers.
You can use a Container Controller. A Container Controller can have the base layout, which I defined in a nib, containing a navigation bar and a bar button item to toggle the menu, and then add child view controllers and remove them as you need them. That way, you can throw whatever view controller you need to the container controller and it will display it.
You can also add gesture control to slide open/close the menu easily.
You will have to make the Container controller your self, it is not standard. I think it is better solution than inheritance, since if you use inheritance you can't make a for example UITableViewController, all your controllers will be of the type of yuor master class. Of course, you can fix this anyway with delegates.
It may sound a bit tricky, but see this tutorial which I used: http://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/containing-viewcontrollers/
It wasn't accutally that hard.
EDIT: You can just use a UINavigationController as well. Just set the base view controller to the view controller you want to display, and you can prevent it adding the back button etc to the nav bar by overriding the default methods. Make a UINavigationController as rootNavigationController. Might be simpler.
I'd highly recommend using an open source solution that handles all the edge cases for you - it's both the easiest, most robust and most maintainable (since the community will keep it up to date fro you). ViewDeck seems to be the most popular solution though I have also had success with PPRevealSideViewController. They both provide a very robust implementation that would take a long time to do yourself (e.g. you can optionally enable swipe on the navigation bar or even content area to open the menu). Furthermore they separate the sliding logic and the revealed menu (which can be any view controller you like, but most likely a table view controller) out of your other view controllers. That way any viewcontroller can have a side menu without duplicating any code - separation of concern is great :)
You can make a SharedInstance for SideView class. I am doing same thing for iAD to show throught-out the application.
Please see the the link of iAdSuite ,In which the BannerViewController is SharedInstance so they are easily used for all View Controller
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/iAdSuite/Listings/TabbedBanner_TabbedBanner_BannerViewController_m.html
I have created Storyboard with several views calling each other, now I need to create the code
I notice that XCode didn't created .h and .m controller files for each View from storyboard.
Should I create them manually?
Should I keep only one controller? (or few depending of separation of concerns on MVC)
Is there a pattern for developing this?
thanks
The usual approach is one view controller pr. screen full of content. You can imagine having one view controller for a tableview, with any sort of content, and then another view controller that presents that content in a new screen full of content if a row is pressed.
Normally when you have subviews inside of your view controllers, you wire them up in interfacebuilder. Then for instance if you want to populate a view that has a uiimageview and a uiactivityindicatorview inside it, you can control their behavior and how their populated from the view controllers code. You could also if you want something very generic and you feel that one view will probably take up a lot of code in your view controller, create a uiview subclass for it, and then set the class in interface builder.
Did this help? Please let me know if you need more clarification.
It's entirely up to you whether you have a ViewController for each view. If you have many views I would recommend it. Even if you have 2 or 3 views you probably still should. Things can get really confusing when each view has a different task but all have similar IBOutlets.
TLDR; Personally, I would say it was good practice to have a ViewController for each view if each view has a separate task.
In my app I would like to replace the TabBar with a ToolBar under certain conditions, similar to what happens in the Photos App when a user places it in selections mode (A toolbar with share copy, etc, buttons appear over the tab bar). How can I achieve this please?
This can be achieved by creating a new toolbar, assigning it an appropriate frame and adding it to self.tabBarController.view
I'm assuming your root view controller is a UITabBarController. Sometimes using the canned "Root" UIViewControllers is more of a hindrance than a help, especially if you want a highly custom look that does not fit into the paradigm of what the canned controllers offer. There's no reason you have to use them -- you could write your own, and do your own transition between your sub-UIViewController views onto the screen. You can use the UITabBar without the UITabBarController in your own custom UIViewController subclass, then you don't end up fighting the behavior of UITabBarController. Writing your own root ViewController can be very instructive as well -- you learn about all the things a root ViewController must do to manage the sub-ViewControllers.
I have a UITableViewController that I need to cover with another nib in some situations
Whats a good way to do this?
You might want to check out the class UINavigationController. It helps you manage a stack of view controllers, with only the top one visible.
Depending on what you're attempting to do, you could use presentModalViewController:animated: to slide up a new view and cover your table. Then there is William's solution which would be to create a UINavigationController which will enable you to push and pop views into a stack.
I have always sort of wondered when to use a UIView vs. a UIViewController on the iPhone.
I understand that you shouldn't use a UIViewController unless it's a full-screen view, but what other guidelines are there?
For example, I want to build a modal overlay - a screen that will slide into place over the current screen. If this modal overlay is full-screen, should it be a UIViewController? The last time I built something like this, I subclassed UIViewController, but now I wonder if that was correct.
From Apple's View Controller Programming Guide for iOS:
"The most important role of a view controller is to manage a hierarchy of views. Every view controller has a single root view that encloses all of the view controller’s content. To that root view, you add the views you need to display your content."
Also:
"There are two types of view controllers:
Content view controllers manage a discrete piece of your app’s content and are the main type of view controller that you create.
Container view controllers collect information from other view controllers (known as child view controllers) and present it in a way that facilitates navigation or presents the content of those view controllers differently.
Most apps are a mixture of both types of view controllers."
This is a great question.
My basic rule of thumb. Is that every major 'page' of an application gets it's own view controller. What I mean by that is that during the wire framing stage of application design, everything that exists as its own entity will eventually be managed by its own View Controller. If there is a modal screen that slides over an existing screen, I will consider that to be a separate 'page' and give it its own view controller. If there is a view that overlays and existing page (such as a loading screen or help popup.) I would treat those differently, implement them as UIView subclasses and keep the logic in that 'pages' view controller. It the popup has behavior I will communicate back to that pages View Controller using the delegate pattern.
I hope this helps. It is very much a philosophical and architectural question and much could be written about it.
I use UIViewController whenever a view is full screen and either has outlets/actions and/or subviews.
Put everything on a screen into a UIViewController until the view controller starts to have too much code, then break out the screen into multiple UIViewControllers contained by one master view controller...
To put that into context of your answer, make a view controller for that modal overlay. It will have one anyway if you are using a nav controller to present it (and you probably should).
I have a somewhat different approach:
Override UIView if you plan to do custom drawing in drawRect. Otherwise, subclass UIViewController and use [self.view addSubview: blah] to add the components of the page.
There are a few other special cases, but that handles about 95% of the situations.
(You still will often need a UIViewController with a custom UIView. But it's common to have a custom UIViewController with no corresponding custom UIView.)
Is the thing that slides in a self contained screen? I mean, does it directly interact with the parent? If so, make it a UIView, if not, probably recommend a UIViewController.
A UIView is part of the UIViewController see the view property of UIViewController for this. As you pointed out correctly UIViewController manages a complete screen and there should be only one visible UIViewController at a time. But in most cases you will have more UIViews or subclasses of UIView visible on the screen.
The example you gave would be a correct use in most cases. As you may have noticed you will get a lot of functionality when subclassing the UIViewController. Animating the appearance and dismissal of the UIViewController would be one of them.
As marcc pointed out if the thing you want to slide in is not a self contained screen you would be better off using a UIView.
As a conclusion I would say that if you want to use the functionality that comes with subclassing UIViewController than go for it make it a UIViewController. Otherwise a UIView might be better.
The itunes U Standford class has a great lecture on UIViewControllers I would recommend watching it, because it has a lot of information regarding UIViewControllers in general.
If you are familiar with the MVC pattern, then you should be able to understand the difference between UIVIew and UIViewController. To make a simple statement, UIView is for rendering UI elements on screen. UIView is the superclass of pretty much all Cocoa Touch UI elements. Those elements do not know what information they are supposed to display, what they should do when a user clicks a button, what happens when an async network request is completed and so on. UIViewController is for all that and more. The view controller is responsible for placing the UI elements in the correct locations on screen, setting the contents of the UI elements, handling button presses and other user inputs, updating the model when needed etc.
Conceptually, a single UIViewController controls the contents of the whole screen in an iPhone App and that is why it is often easy to think of things in terms of view controllers. If you need a view where the user can select ingredients for a food recipe, you'll need a UIViewController for that. I made this distinction for myself because coming from a Java background I wasn't used to the framework enforcing MVC. I would think of things in terms of UIViews, and start implementing them that way and then run into all sorts of trouble because of that. If you are going to stick to UIKit for your App, then the workflow Apple has made for you is: for each separate view in your App, create a UIViewController subclass and then use Interface Builder to place the UI elements and to create connections for buttons etc. It works wonders, saves a ton of time and lets you concentrate on making your App function well.
I use UIViewController for showing View on full Screen.
For better control on custom view I prefer subclass of UIViewController instead of UIView, earlier I was using UIView for making custom sub class.