Custom navigation back button with custom title in swift3 - ios

Question

I need to implement the navigation bar with custom back image and custom title. For example: if i am in "Login with facebook" page i need to show the "Login with facebook" besides the custom back image. For this i am following the code like this:
let yourBackImage = UIImage(named: "back_button_image")
self.navigationController?.navigationBar.backIndicatorImage = yourBackImage
self.navigationController?.navigationBar.backIndicatorTransitionMaskImage = yourBackImage
self.navigationController?.navigationBar.backItem?.title = "Custom"
But I am getting the output like this:
Note: The title is of the current page.
How to achieve this?

Answer 1

If the back title is too long iOS will change it to 'Back'.
However if you add a left bar button item - this you can set to a longer length.
long back
From Apple docs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uinavigationcontroller
In cases where the title of a back button is too long to fit in the available space, the navigation bar may substitute the string “Back” for the actual button title. The navigation bar does this only if the back button is provided by the previous view controller. If the new top-level view controller has a custom left bar button item—an object in the
leftBarButtonItem
or
leftBarButtonItems
property of its navigation item—the navigation bar does not change the button title.
To do this go to the Storyboard, in Interface Builder, drag a Bar Button Item into your navigation bar and set its title.
*Note that you will need to hook this up to your view controller to pop it.
#IBAction func pop(_ sender: UIBarButtonItem) {
_ = navigationController?.popViewController(animated: true)
}

Answer 2

You'll find a lot of StackOverflow attempts to answer this (quite common) issue, and the best way that I've found is also rather complicated. You'll have to do this for every UINavigationController, UINavigationBar, and UINavigationItem in your app, and that's painful.
How Apple wants you to do it (as far as I can tell)
For UINavigationBars in a storyboard, set the Back and Back Mask values (in the Attributes inspector) to the name of your custom image.
For every view controller's UINavigationItem, set its Back attribute value to an empty string or single space.
Easy enough, right? Nope. For one thing, the empty string or single-space Back title isn't always honored. And what if you have dozens, or even hundreds, of view controllers? What if your application has multiple UINavigationControllers? What if you set configure your view controllers (or at least their navigation items) programmatically? Then it's not so easy.
How StackOverflow thinks you should do it
I'm not going to link to all of the SO answers that recommend this way of doing things. I'll just summarize it as:
Hide the navigation item's back button with UINavigationItem.setHidesBackBarItem(_:animated:).
Create a UIBarButtonItem with your custom back image and empty title, then add it to your navigation item's leftBarButtonItem.
Sit back and wait for user bug reports to flood in with complaints that your app doesn't support swiping to navigate back.
Or, if you want to be clever, attach your navigation controller's interactivePopGestureRecognizer to your custom left bar button item. This usually works, but it feels like a hack that's likely to break in future releases. If you're ok with that, then you can stop reading right here.
How I think you should do it
If you have a lot of view controllers (our app has 200+) and/or a mix of VCs configured programmatically and in storyboards, this may ultimately be an easier way.
Create a subclass of UINavigationBar and set this as the class for all navigation bars in your storyboards and code. (If you're doing it in code, note that the nav bar is a read-only property; it can be set only in the navigation controller's initializer.)
The UINavigationBar manages a stack of UINavigationItems, one for each view controller on the UINavigationController's stack, and keeps them in sync with their view controllers. In other words, when you push a view controller onto the nav controller, that view controller's nav item also gets pushed onto the nav bar, and it gets popped when the VC is popped. When the navigation bar pushes or pops an item, it uses the new topmost item's title, titleView, and/or button item properties to set configure its own title view and buttons, and uses the title of the navigation item immediately below the topmost one to configure its back button and back image. If the next-to-topmost item's title is nil, then the nav bar uses the default value of "Back". You don't want that. If you can set the Back attribute to an empty or single-space string in the storyboard, then you should be able to do the same thing in code, right? Wrong. The back text is not a public property in UINavigationItem! WTF?
Instead, you have to set the title of the next-to-topmost item to an empty string. "But wait!" you say, "Doesn't that permanently change the next-to-topmost item's title, so that when I navigate back to that view controller, its title will say "Back" instead of its original title?" And you'd be right. What can you do? In your subclass of UINavigationBar, add an array of Optional title strings, like so:
var navigationItemTitles = [String?]()
(Why Optional? Because navigation items may have a custom titleView instead of a title.)
Override the navigation bar's pushNavigationItem(_:animated:) and popNavigationItemAnimated(_:) so that they modify and restore the navigation items' titles, respectively:
override func pushNavigationItem(_ item: UINavigationItem, animated: Bool) {
super.pushNavigationItem(item, animated: animated)
// Store the new back item's title, then set its title to
// an empty string.
if let backItem = backItem {
navigationItemTitles.push(backItem.title)
backItem.title = ""
}
}
override func popNavigationItemAnimated(_ animated: Bool) {
super.popNavigationItemAnimated(animated)
// Restore the new top item's title.
if navigationItemTitles.count > 0 {
topItem?.title = navigationItemTitles.popLast
}
}
Caveats
This is the only way I've found that's foolproof and not hacky. If Apple simply made the navigation item's Back property publicly settable, then a lot of this could be avoided.
(For what its worth, not only does our app have 200+ view controllers, it also has multiple navigation controllers with different navigation bar looks and feels. That's a whole other layer of complexity.)