Animating to View Controller that is a UINavigationController - ios

I'm trying to use transitioningDelegate to apply custom animations when transitioning from VC1 to VC2. This, in general, works but now a need a navigation bar in VC2. So, I embedded VC2 in a navigation controller which gets me my navigation bar but now the methods for doing the animation (via transitioningDelegate) are not called. I can't use the animation for navigation controllers because VC2 is essentially the root of my navigation controller so, subsequent push/pop can be animated but not the first one.
Is there anything special needed when animating to navigation controller?
This is in Xcode 7, iOS 9 and using Storyboards.
Please help.
PS: Merry Christmas!

So first of all, to your question, it seems like in your animation code, you should use the navigation controller object instead of VC2 to be part of the animation, not VC2, because you embed it, otherwise, you won't have your VC2 in a navigation stack.
From my experience, transitioningDelegate is about presenting a view controller with custom modal presentation type. It has limitations if you want advanced view controllers transitions, because not every scenario is suitable for 'presenting(modal)' a controller, such as I got a login view controller, and presenting your home view controller on a login controller is kind of limited.
I used to create a container controller, which is the parent of all the others controllers, so I can use
- (void)transitionFromViewController:(UIViewController *)fromViewController
toViewController:(UIViewController *)toViewController
duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration
options:(UIViewAnimationOptions)options
animations:(void (^)(void))animations
completion:(void (^)(BOOL finished))completion
to gain the ultimate control of the transit and animations among child view controllers. It has nothing to do with modal, navigation controller, they just have to be in a common parent view controller, like appDelegate.window.rootViewController
Let's say we have a parent controller named parentViewController
We manually add VC1 and navigationController(which embeds VC2) into parentViewController and transit them with animations you like:
[parentViewController addChildViewController:VC1];
[parentViewController addChildViewController:navigationController];
[VC1 willMoveToParentViewController:nil];
[parentViewController transitionFromViewController:VC1
toViewController:navigationController
duration:duration
options:options
animations:^{
// your animation code, or do nothing and use UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionCrossDissolve as options to have a default animation
} completion:^(BOOL finished) {
[navigationController didMoveToParentViewController:parentViewController];
[VC1 removeFromParentViewController];
}];
note
[VC1 willMoveToParentViewController:nil];
[navigationController didMoveToParentViewController:parentViewController];
[VC1 removeFromParentViewController];
They are essential to be called.

Related

viewDidAppear and viewDidDisappear not called when modalPresentationStyle=UIModalPresentationCustom

I need to do a custom presentation animation and when i set both these setTransitioningDelegate and modalPresentationStyle=UIModalPresentationCustom
The animation is perfect with unless the viewDidAppear and viewDidDisappear is not called in the presenting viewcontroller.This is same for Apple sample code in https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/LookInside/Introduction/Intro.html
[overlay setTransitioningDelegate:[self transitioningDelegate]];
overlay.modalPresentationStyle=UIModalPresentationCustom;
[self presentViewController:overlay animated:YES completion:NULL];
Why the methods are called when no modalPresentationStyle is given?
This is the correct behaviour as presenting a new view controller only hides the presenting view controller. It doesn't add the view to the hierarchy when the presented view controller is dismissed, and it doesn't remove the presenting view controller view from the hierarchy when the view controller that is presented is presented.
Short story; it hides the view of the presenting view controller instead of removing it. Therefore the methods aren't invoked.

Modal Presentation Forcing Navigation Controller to Pop to Root

I am having a strange problem that I can't seem to find the cause for.
When attempting to present a modal view controller on a navigation controller the navigation controller is popping all of my view controllers underneath when the modal is dismissed.
So after pushing a few view controllers and presenting a modal on the topViewController, I end up back at the rootViewController when the modal is dismissed.
Anyone had this happen to them lately, I can't seem to find the reasoning for why this is happening?
This answer is for #rshev:
It was actually a user error. Here's what was happening: I had a view controller with a manually added navigationController on top of it (as a subview/child VC). The nav controller then had 3 VCs in its stack. The third (and visible) VC was presenting an image picker controller. When the image picker was dismissed, I momentarily saw my third VC , then it quickly popped back to the 1st, discarding the other two VC's from memory.
So what went wrong? What I didn't realize is that viewDidAppear (and viewWillAppear) was being called on my content view controller (the one with nav controller for its subview). This content VC was actually setting its navigation controller (and adding it as a subview) on viewDidAppear, thus covering up the original nav controller.
To solve it, I just added a static boolean to determine when the first VC FIRST appears, like so:
- (void) viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
static BOOL firstAppearance = YES;
if (firstAppearance)
{
firstAppearance = NO;
UINavigationController *navController = [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"NavigationController"];
[navController.view setFrame:self.view.bounds];
[self.view addSubview:navController.view];
[self addChildViewController:navController];
[navController didMoveToParentViewController:self];
}
}
Hope that helps.

ViewController WILL NOT dismiss

WLINewPostViewController *newPostViewController = [[WLINewPostViewController alloc] initWithNibName:#"WLINewPostViewController" bundle:nil];
UINavigationController *newPostNavigationController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:newPostViewController];
newPostNavigationController.navigationBar.translucent = NO;
[tabBarController presentViewController:newPostNavigationController animated:YES completion:nil];
So I just simply push a new UIViewController.
Then after it posts the server callback calls a method with this code from the WLINewPostViewController.m:
[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:^{
NSLog(#"Completed");
}];
[[self navigationController] popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
if (self == self.navigationController.visibleViewController){
NSLog(#"self = visibile");
}
if (self == self.presentingViewController.presentingViewController){
NSLog(#"self = presenting");
}
}
I tried a bunch of different things and none work.
I am relatively new to Xcode but after trying
[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion]
[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES]
[self.navigationController.visibleViewController.presentedViewController dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];
[self.navigationController dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];
and every other possibility, I am officially stumped. The WLINewPostViewController still won't dismiss.
It Logs out "self = visible"
Let me illustrate what you are trying to do
You have a navigation controller with Controller A.
Here you are trying to present another Controller B from Controller A.
Now when you get a callback from the server, you should call dismissViewControllerAnimated from Controller B to dismiss itself.
So after dismissViewControllerAnimated:completion: method call, the Controller B will be dismissed and Controller A will be shown automatically. Now you do not need to call popViewControllerAnimated: in completion block again as there is no other Controller in navigation controller to load.
If you have different use case, let me know I can provide solution.
You are presenting a view over navigationbar instead of pushing it over navigationbar.
When push you pop. When you present you dismiss. So instead of popViewControllerAnimated you need to use dismissViewControllerAnimated:completion
dismiss behaves differently depending on the receiver. From the docs:
The presenting view controller is responsible for dismissing the view controller it presented. If you call this method on the presented view controller itself, it automatically forwards the message to the presenting view controller.
If you present several view controllers in succession, thus building a stack of presented view controllers, calling this method on a view controller lower in the stack dismisses its immediate child view controller and all view controllers above that child on the stack. When this happens, only the top-most view is dismissed in an animated fashion; any intermediate view controllers are simply removed from the stack. The top-most view is dismissed using its modal transition style, which may differ from the styles used by other view controllers lower in the stack.
In short, if the vc on top calls it on itself, it dismisses itself. Anywhere else on the stack dismisses to that point, animating only the topmost vc.
What's extra confusing (for you and many others) is that the navigation vc has a stack too, and your problem is complicated further by presenting an navigation vc atop a tab-bar vc.
So what to do? The question is unclear about which vc is the receiver in the posted code (who is self in that snippet?). The text implies that self is a vc on the stack of the presented navigation vc, like...
TabBarVC --- presents ---> NavVC
| |
| --- viewControllers stack = rootVC, vc1
|
---> viewControllers for each tab
... and it's root or vc1 that wants to dismiss. If I'm right about that, then, given the docs, the solution is clear:
[self.navigationController dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:^{}];
will put us back on the tabbar vc on whatever tab was visible when we did the present.

Subview UINavigationController Leak ARC

I'm experiencing a memory leak (the UINavigationController and its root View Controller are both being leaked) when presenting and dismissing a UINavigationController in a subview. My method of presentation of the navigation controller seems a bit non-standard, so I was hoping someone in the SO community might be able to help.
1. Presentation
The Navigation Controller is presented as follows:
-(void) presentSubNavigationControllerWithRootViewControllerIdentifier:(NSString *)rootViewControllerIdentifier inStoryboardWithName:(NSString *)storyboardName {
// grab the root view controller from a storyboard
UIStoryboard * storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:storyboardName bundle:nil];
UIViewController * rootViewController = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:rootViewControllerIdentifier];
// instantiate the navigation controller
UINavigationController * nc = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:rootViewController];
// perform some layout configuration that should be inconsequential to memory management (right?)
[nc setNavigationBarHidden:YES];
[nc setEdgesForExtendedLayout:UIRectEdgeLeft | UIRectEdgeRight | UIRectEdgeBottom];
nc.view.frame = _navControllerParentView.bounds;
// install the navigation controller (_navControllerParentView is a persisted IBOutlet)
[_navControllerParentView addSubview:nc.view];
// strong reference for easy access
[self setSubNavigationController:nc];
}
At this point, my expectation is that the only "owner" of the navigation controller is the parent view controller (in this case, self). However, when dismissing the navigation controller as shown below, it is not deallocated (and as a result its rootViewController is also leaked, and so on down the ownership tree).
2. Dismissal
Dismissal is pretty simple, but it seems not to be sufficient for proper memory management:
-(void) dismissSubNavigationController {
// prevent an orphan view from remaining in the view hierarchy
[_subNavigationController.view removeFromSuperview];
// release our reference to the navigation controller
[self setSubNavigationController:nil];
}
Surely something else is "retaining" the navigation controller as it is not deallocated. I don't think it could possibly be the root view controller retaining it, could it?
Some research has suggested that retainCount is meaningless, but FWIW I've determined that it remains at 2 after dismissal, where I would expect it to be zero.
Is there an entirely different / better method of presenting the subNavigationController? Maybe defining the navigation controller in the storyboard would have greater benefit than simply eliminating the need for a few lines of code?
It is best practice when adding a controller's view as a subview of another controller's view, that you make that added view's controller a child view controller; that is, the controller whose view your adding it to, should implement the custom container controller api. An easy way to set this up is to use a container view in the storyboard which gives you an embedded controller automatically (you can select that controller and, in the edit menu, choose embed in Navigation controller to get the UI you're trying to make). Normally, this embedded view controller would be added right after the parent controller's view is loaded, but you can suppress that by implementing shouldPerformSegueWithIdentifier:sender:. I created a simple test app with this storyboard,
The code in ViewController to suppress the initial presentation, and the button methods to subsequently present and dismiss it is below,
#implementation ViewController
-(BOOL)shouldPerformSegueWithIdentifier:(NSString *)identifier sender:(id)sender {
if ([identifier isEqualToString:#"Embed"]) { // The embed segue in IB was given this identifier. This method is not called when calling performSegueWithIdentifier:sender: in code (as in the button method below)
return NO;
}else{
return YES;
}
}
- (IBAction)showEmbed:(UIButton *)sender {
[self performSegueWithIdentifier:#"Embed" sender:self];
}
- (IBAction)dismissEmbed:(UIButton *)sender {
[[self.childViewControllers.firstObject view] removeFromSuperview];
[self.childViewControllers.firstObject willMoveToParentViewController:nil];
[self.childViewControllers.firstObject removeFromParentViewController];
}
#end
The navigation controller and any of its child view controllers are properly deallocated when the Dismiss button is touched.
The navigationController property on a UIViewController is retain/strong, which is presumably the other strong reference.
So try popping all view controllers from the navigation controller and see if that works.

Dismissing a ViewController lower in the stack does not behave as expected

I'm building a complex app that has kind of a branch in the middle.
At some point in the app, a particular UIViewController is presented, we'll call it mainViewController (shortened mainVC).
The mainVC presents another view controller, by code, using the following code (I strip out parts of it for privacy reasons):
UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"SecondaryStoryboard" bundle:secondaryBundle];
SecondViewController *secondVC = [storyboard instantiateInitialViewController];
[self presentViewController:secondVC animated:YES completion:nil];
So the secondVC will later present another view controller, called thirdVC. This is done using a custom segue, set in the storyboard used in the code above, which code looks like this:
#implementation VCCustomPushSegue
- (void)perform {
UIView *sourceView = ((UIViewController *)self.sourceViewController).view;
UIView *destinationView = ((UIViewController *)self.destinationViewController).view;
UIWindow *window = [[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate] window];
destinationView.center = CGPointMake(sourceView.center.x + sourceView.frame.size.width, destinationView.center.y);
[window insertSubview:destinationView aboveSubview:sourceView];
[UIView animateWithDuration:0.4
animations:^{
destinationView.center = CGPointMake(sourceView.center.x, destinationView.center.y);
sourceView.center = CGPointMake(0 - sourceView.center.x, destinationView.center.y);
}
completion:^(BOOL finished){
[self.sourceViewController presentViewController:self.destinationViewController animated:NO completion:nil];
}];
}
#end
As you can see this segue presents the destination view controller modally (by the use of presentViewController:) with a custom animation (a slide from right to left).
So basically up to here everything is fine. I present the secondVC with a classic modal animation (slide up from bottom) and present the thirdVC with my custom transition.
But when I want to dismiss the thirdVC, what I want is to go back directly to the mainVC. So I call the following from the thirdVC :
self.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleCoverVertical;
[self.presentingViewController.presentingViewController dismissViewControllerAnimated:_animate completion:nil];
That way, I'm calling dismissViewControllerAnimated: directly on mainVC (referenced by self.presentingViewController.presentingViewController), and I'm expecting the thirdVC to be dismissed with an animation, and the secondVC to just disappear without animation.
As Apple says in the UIViewController Class Documentation:
The presenting view controller is responsible for dismissing the view
controller it presented. If you call this method on the presented view
controller itself, it automatically forwards the message to the
presenting view controller.
If you present several view controllers in succession, thus building a
stack of presented view controllers, calling this method on a view
controller lower in the stack dismisses its immediate child view
controller and all view controllers above that child on the stack.
When this happens, only the top-most view is dismissed in an animated
fashion; any intermediate view controllers are simply removed from the
stack. The top-most view is dismissed using its modal transition
style, which may differ from the styles used by other view controllers
lower in the stack.
The issue is that it's not what happens. In my scenario, the thirdVC disappears, and shows the secondVC being dismissed with the classic modal slide to bottom animation.
What am I doing wrong ?
Edit :
So #codeFi's answer is probably working in a classic project, but the problem here is that I'm working on a framework. So mainVC would be in a client app, and the secondVC and thirdVC are in my framework, in a separate storyboard. I don't have access to mainVC in any other way than a reference to it in my code, so unwind segues are unfortunately not an option here.
I've been having this exact same issue, and I've managed to visually work around it by adding a snapshot of the screen as a subview to secondVC.view, like so:
if (self.presentedViewController.presentedViewController) {
[self.presentedViewController.view addSubview:[[UIScreen mainScreen] snapshotViewAfterScreenUpdates:NO]];
}
[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];
Not pretty, but it seems to be working.
NOTE: if your secondVC has a navigation bar, you will need to hide the navigation bar in between snapshotting the screen and adding the snapshot as a subview to secondVC, as otherwise the snapshot will appear below the navigation bar, thus seemingly displaying a double navigation bar during the dismissal animation. Code:
if (self.presentedViewController.presentedViewController) {
UIView *snapshot = [[UIScreen mainScreen] snapshotViewAfterScreenUpdates:NO];
[self.presentedViewController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:YES animated:NO];
[self.presentedViewController.view addSubview:snapshot];
}
[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];
I had the same issue and I've fixed it by using UnwindSegues.
Basically, all you have to do is add an IBAction Unwind Segue method in the ViewController that you want to segue to and then connect in IB the Exit action to your Unwind Segue method.
Example:
Let's say you have three ViewControllers (VC1, VC2, VC3) and you want to go from VC3 to VC1.
Step 1
Add a method to VC1 like the following:
- (IBAction)unwindToVC1:(UIStoryboardSegue*)sender
{
}
Step 2
Go in Interface Builder to VC3 and select it. Then CTRL-drag from your VC icon to Exit icon and select the method you've just added in VC1.
Step 3
While still in IB and with VC3 selected, select your Unwind Segue and in the Attributes Inspector add a Segue Identifier.
Step 4
Go to VC3 where you need to perform your segue (or dismiss the VC) and add the following:
[self performSegueWithIdentifier:#"VC1Segue" sender:self];

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