I'm currently building a tabbed iPhone application where each tab's view controller is an instance of UINavigationController, and where every subcontroller of every one of the UINavigationController instances is an instance of UITableViewController. Ideally, I'd like to subclass UINavigationController so that the controller for each tab is a subclass of UINavigationController that (in addition to having all the standard UINavigationController functionality, obviously) serves as the datasource and the delegate for each of the table views associated with its subcontrollers. Trying to do this seems to break the basic UINavigationController functionality in the subclass.
Seeing as Apple says in their iPhone documentation that one shouldn't subclass UINavigationController, and things seem to break when one does, I'm wondering how I should go about extending UINavigationController's functionality without subclassing, and generally speaking, how one should work around subclassing limitations when doing Cocoa development.
Thanks!
Why on earth do you want the UINavigationController to act as a datasource for the table? The whole point of UITableViewController is that you subclass it, and it acts as the datasource for the UITableView that it also places in, and fills, the parent view.
For reference, note that since iOS 6, UINavigationController can be subclassed legally.
This class is generally used as-is but may be subclassed in iOS 6 and later.
UINavigationController Class Reference
Of course, that doesn't mean you always should. But you can.
I'm going to go ahead and say your idea has some merit, if at every level you are truly using the same kind of data and each level perhaps has a different delegate to handle cell creation.
Basically there's no reason you cannot subclass UINavigation controller to add a totally orthogonal layer of data atop it, because it has nothing to do with the UI or behavior that UINavigationController is managing (which is what Apple is concerned you will be messing with). To those opposed to the idea, think of it as a per-tab data store that all pages in a tab can access instead of every page in the system having to go to the AppDelegate, or have a bunch of singletons. Well basically it's a singleton, but at least one that is already there and gets the reference passed around automatically.
All that said, I'll end with an alternate design proposal - I think what you are probably wanting to do is drill down through multiple layers reusing the same code to generate cells and such because you have the same kinds of data at each layer. A better approach to handle that is to have one view controller that you feed the subset of data to display, and when a user drills down it simply creates another instance of the same view controller with that new subset of data. That approach is much better than the idea of having the navigation controller act as a table delegate for each level, because you'd have to do a ton of rewiring moving back and forth and it would require even more work to remember scroll position at each level to boot. That's why you want to keep drill-downs using multiple instances of view controllers, but multiple instances doesn't have to mean multiple classes.
As I understand it, subclassing is not encouraged because Objective C allows a subclass too much access to the internal workings of its superclass.
The suggested alternative to writing a subclass is to write a delegate, in this case a UINavigationControllerDelegate. You can then encapsulate the specific behavior you want to extend into this delegate class, and link it up to the UINavigationController whenever you need it.
If the available controller heirarchy does not serve your needs in terms of handling data (my assumption, since we don't know why you want one object to be the datasource for multiple views), you can always create additional data and/or controller classes (subclasses of NSObject at least).
You can have a data or other object persist while changing views in various ways. (1) a property of your application delegate class. Any object in your app can get your app delegate instance with
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate]
Use this sparingly since it's essentially creating globals.
(2) You can pass data or other objects from controller to controller as you push view controller subclasses or bring them up within tabs.
(3) Core Data is another way but requires a lot of Cocoa under your belt, and you still have to manage the context instance(s).
Because they want to avoid the UI inconsistency that plagues every other platform.
Related
If I have a bunch of ViewControllers that are only ever going to deal with a single view, or even if my ViewController is going to deal with multiple views, why should I use another ViewControllers to manage the other ViewControllers? Why wouldn't I just change out ViewControllers at the ApplicationDelegate level?
Maybe I'm thinking about ViewController the wrong way? I'm used to writing in the MVC pattern with Ruby/.NET. For an example, if I were working with widgets I'd probably have a WidgetController and a List view, and a Detail view for the WidgetController.
What is the analogous iPhone MVC construction? I'd assume the WidgetController would subclass the ViewController and I'd have a couple different views depending on how I wanted to look at the widget data. Then, when I wanted to deal with Wodgits I'd make a WodgitController with its associated views and swap the window's subview out with the new Wodgit ViewController.
I don't see what having a RootViewController to control my controllers buys me. Where is the value? What am I missing?
I'll focus on one aspect: Compartmentalization is a very useful design principal. If you separate concerns and put things where they "belong", they will be easier to find, maintain, build upon, and co-opt for new purposes.
Consider this:
All the pipes in your house go to the same place. Do you urinate in your sink, or do you use the fixture designed for that purpose?
In the case of your app, the application delegate is responsible for responding to application events and managing universal application resources. The root view controller is responsible for managing your views and view controllers. As a view controller it has special abilities to do so with navigation control, the ability to present modal views, act as a delegate, etc. While you could create a view controller and manipulate it completely in the application delegate, the task will become exponentially more difficult as you multiply the number of views you are managing, especially if you wish to be a text field delegate, data source, etc. On the other hand, it is easy to split the root view controller into its own class. There is very little cost.
Why pee in the sink when the toilet is a step away?
I've seen custom subviews implemented as an UIViewController subclass, but that maybe could have been implemented as an UIView subclass.
When should I subclass UIViewController instead of UIView for a subview? Are there any drawbacks to subclassing UIViewController?
Personally, when I need some significant logic to go on, I do it with a UIViewController subclass. Also, if I am looking for some of the behavior that you get from UIViewController e.g. presenting it modally or in a navigation controller.
If you are doing something fairly simple or lightweight, a UIView subclass is usually enough. I seem to have used them most often when making custom buttons and table view cells.
In my experience I have found myself using more UIViewController subclasses than UIView subclasses, but this might not be the best, it just so happens that I feel a bit more comfortable using view controllers rather than straight-up views.
Take a look at what Apple has to say on Controller Objects and the MVC design pattern
In iOS controller are generally expected to fill at least one the following roles:
Coordinating controllers provide application specific logic. They respond to delegate messages, notifications, and IBActions. Coordinating controllers also setup connections between other objects and often manage the creation and destruction of those objects.
View controllers, specifically UIViewControllers, manage the display of one "screen" worth of content and trigger transitions to the next "screen". They respond to memory warnings and rotation events.
Mediating controllers exist in OS X but their role is usually filled by view controllers in iOS. They act as an intermediary between views and models; updating models when views receive input and updating views when models change.
If the behavior you are implementing fits into one of these categories you probably want to create a controller object. If your logic is only concerned with the display of data (and possibly responding to user input) then perhaps it belongs in the view layer. If your logic is about the data itself then it probably belongs in the model.
If you can't find a good fit for your logic in any of those layers then you probably should model it differently as a combination of different responsibilities which belong on different objects in different layers. ie a view which requests data to display from a mediating view controller.
You would also subclass the UIViewController if you're going to use an AdBannerView in your "view". AdBannerView needs a UIViewController to be able to work.
The thumb rule I follow is, If you are doing custom drawing, subclass UIView. Otherwise, subclass the UIViewController.
Being new to Xcode and Objective-C I find it hard to get my head around the Interface builder and Objective-C when doing things that are following the basic pattern. I have created a subclass of UIViewController that I want to instantiate several times to make a grid with each row being controlled by an instance of this class. So there will be one root view controller (with navigation etc) that should include/genereate all the instances of the custom sub-viewcontroller.
Now what would be the best way to do this? All examples I can find are about navigation, where one view should replace another, but I want to have all the viewcontrollers visible on the same "page". Do I need to create a nib file for the custom controller at all? I have also been thinking about using the UITableView somehow but inserting my custom viewcontroller in every row.
Any help greatly appreciated!
Apple's documentation recommends using one view controller per screen. It is possible to decompose your interface and use multiple view controllers on one screen if you have a good reason to do it, but Apple hasn't really designed their frameworks to support this, so you'll run into pitfalls if you don't know what you're doing.
In this case, I question whether each row of your grid really needs its own view controller. I find it hard to imagine a case where this would be the best choice, although it's hard to say for sure without knowing more about your app. Some things to consider:
What is your custom controller doing? Is it mostly changing the visual appearance of its corresponding grid row? If so, perhaps it would be more appropriate to subclass the UIView itself.
If this object is really behaving as a controller and not a view, consider implementing it as a subclass of NSObject rather than subclassing UIViewController. The UIViewController for your screen can capture events and delegate them to the appropriate custom controller object, or your custom views can capture their own events and notify their associated controllers of those events directly using a delegate pattern.
If you're sure you have a valid reason to implement these objects as UIViewController subclasses, check out my answer to this question.
I'm learning how to develop my own iPhone apps but I'm having a tough time understanding certain concepts.
First, am i right to say that for every view, there must be a view controller for it? And for every view controller, must there be a delegate for it?
Also, what is the role of mainWindow.nib? Most of the tutorials that i've read don't seem to touch that nib at all. What always happens is the setting up of a NavigationController as the root controller, which pushes another ViewController onto the stack and this ViewController will have another nib associated with it.
So can i assume that i can safely ignore the main window nib?
It's all about MVC (Model View Controller), innit?
The Model, well that's up to you - what does your app do? Think of it as the backend, the engine of your app, free of the cruft of font size decisions and touch events.
The View, Apple pretty much wrote that for you. You use their Textfields and tables and imageViews. You assemble them together using Interface Builder into your GUI (packaged as a .nib). You rarely, if ever need to subclass the standard view elements (in a game you want a custom View to draw to, as all your drawing is probably custom). You can break different parts of your GUI into different .nib files if this helps you manage them. It's entirely up to you.
The Controller, so you have probably got some work todo to enable your GUI to represent your model. You need Some Controllers. How many? However many is manageable by you. If you had a view containing 2 subviews would they each need a view controller? Nah, probably not. How complicated is your code to hook up the view to the model?
Some GUI patterns are so common that Apple even wrote the Controller code for you. EG the controller for a UINavigationBar, UINavigationController. So, if your app has hierarchical views that you need to navigate around and you need to display a navigation bar you can use an instance of UINavigationController instead of writing your own class. Yay!
Surely tho, the UINavigationController code (or any other viewController) can't magically know how to integrate with our model, with our view, can it? NO, it can't. In general in Cocoa if there is some class of object that mostly works off the shelf but also has optionally configurable behavoir - allowing us to tailor it to our needs - it is done by Delegation. ie Instead of subclassing UINavigationController we tell the specific instance of it where to find (for want of a better term) it's custom behavoir.
Why? Let's say you have a navigationController, a tableView and a textfield. UINavigationController mostly take care of your navigation needs but you have to have a crazy QUACK sound play each time the user moves to a new view. UITableView is mostly exactly everything you need from a table, EXCEPT you really want the third row in the table on the front page be twice the height of the other rows. And the standard, off -the-shelf UITextField pretty much takes care of your textfield needs EXCEPT you need your textfield to only be editable when the user is facing North. One way to handle this would be to create 3 new classes, a custom UINavigationController, a custom tableView and a custom textfield, and to use these instead. With delegation we could use the classes as they are and have one object be the delegate of all 3 instances - much cleaner.
Delegation is mostly optional, the docs will tell you when, and it's down to you and whether you need that custom behavoir.
I have a view that contains a UITableView and a UILabel which works perfectly as far as I can tell. I really don't want to manage the UIView and UITableView with the same controller as the UITableViewController handles a lot of housekeeping and according to the documentation:
If the view to be managed is a
composite view in which a table view
is one of multiple subviews, you must
use a custom subclass of
UIViewController to manage the table
view (and other views). Do not use a
UITableViewController object because
this controller class sizes the table
view to fill the screen between the
navigation bar and the tab bar (if
either are present).
Why does Apple warn against using it and what will happen if I ignore this warning?
Update: Originally I quoted the following from the Apple Documentation:
You should not use view
controllers to manage views that fill
only a part of their window—that is,
only part of the area defined by the
application content rectangle. If you
want to have an interface composed of
several smaller views, embed them all
in a single root view and manage that
view with your view controller.
While this issue is probably related to why UITableViewController was designed to be fullscreen, it isn't exactly the same issue.
The major practical reason to use only one view controller per screen is because that is the only way to manage navigation.
For example, suppose you have screen that has two separate view controllers and you load it with the navigation controller. Which of the two view controllers do you push and how do you load and reference the second one? (Not to mention the overhead of coordinating the two separate controllers simultaneously.)
I don't think using a single custom controller is a big of a hassle as you think.
Remember, there is no need for the TableviewDataSource and the TableViewDelegate to be in the actual controller. The Apple templates just do that for convenience. You can put the methods implementing both protocol in one class or separate them each into there own class. Then you simply link them up with the table in your custom controller. That way, all the custom controller has to do is manage the frame of tableview itself. All the configuration and data management will be in separate and self-contained objects. The custom control can easily message them if you need data from the other UI elements.
This kind of flexibility, customization and encapsulation is why the delegate design pattern is used in the first place. You can customize the heck out of anything without having to create one monster class that does everything. Instead, you just pop in a delegate module and go.
Edit01: Response to comment
If I understand your layout correctly, your problem is that the UITableViewController is hardwired to set the table to fill the available view. Most of the time the tableview is the top view itself and that works. The main function of the UITableViewController is to position the table so if you're using a non-standard layout, you don't need it. You can just use a generic view controller and let the nib set the table's frame (or do it programmatically). Like I said, its easy to think that the delegate and datasource methods have to be in the controller but they don't. You should just get rid of the tableViewController all together because it serves no purpose in your particular design.
To me, the important detail in Apple's documentation is that they advise you not to use "view controllers [i.e., instances of UIViewController or its subclasses] to manage views that fill only a part of their window". There is nothing wrong with using several (custom) controllers for non-fullscreen views, they just should not be UIViewController objects.
UIViewController expects that its view takes up the entire screen and if it doesn't, you might get strange results. The view controller resizes the view to fit the window (minus navigation bars and toolbars) when it appears, it manages device orientation (which is hard to apply correctly if its view does not take up the entire screen) etc. So given how UIViewController works, I think there is merit to Apple's advice.
However, that doesn't mean that you can't write your own controller classes to manage your subviews. Besides the things I mentioned above, interacting with tab bar and navigation controllers, and receiving memory warnings, there isn't really much that UIViewController does. You could just write your custom controller class (subclassed from NSObject), instantiate it in your "normal" fullscreen view controller and let it handle the interaction with your view.
The only problem I see is the responder chain. A view controller is part of the responder chain so that touch events that your views don't handle get forwarded to the view controller. As I see it, there is no easy way to place your custom controller in the responder chain. I don't know if this is relevant for you. If you can manage interaction with your view with the target-action mechanism, it wouldn't matter.
I have an application where I did use 2 separate UIViewController subclasses below another view controller to manage a table view and a toolbar. It 'kind of' works, but I got myself into a massive pickle as a result and now realize that I should not be using UIViewController subclasses for the sub controllers because they contain behavior that I don't need and that gets in the way.
The sort of things that went wrong, tended to be:
Strange resizing of the views when coming back from sub navigation and geometry calculations being different between viewWillLoad and viewDidLoad etc.
Difficulty in handling low memory warnings when I freed the subview controllers when I shouldn't have done.
Its the expectation that UIViewController subclasses won't be used like this, and the way they handle events, using the navigation controller etc that made trying to use more than one UIViewController subclass for the same page tricky because you end up spending more time circumventing their behaviour in this context.
In my opinion, The Apple Way is to provide you the "one" solution. This served the end-users very well. No choice, no headache.
We are programmers and we want to and need to customize. However, in some cases, Apple still doesn't want us to do too many changes. For example, the height of tab bar, tool bar and nav bar, some default sizes of the UI components(table view), some default behaviors, etc.. And when designing a framework and a suite of APIs, they need to nail down some decisions. Even if it's a very good and flexible design, there is always one programmer in the world wants to do something different and find it difficult to achieve against the design.
In short, you want a table view and a label on the same screen, but they don't think so. :)