Adding subview to current on screen view from within AppDelegate - ios

I'm working with some pre-existing code and frankly I'm a bit lost.
My goal is to create a view that displays on the bottom half of the screen when the user RETURNS to the app. This view forces the user to re-enter their password as verification. I've been informed AppDelegate's applicationDidBecomeActive is a good place to handle this process. The issue I'm running into is that the top half of the screen needs to show the view the user was previously viewing before the application became inactive. What is the best way to do this?
What I've been trying to do:
I made a view controller called passwordVerificationViewController and made a corresponding XIB. In applicationDidBecomeActive I try:
UIViewController *myCurrentController = (UIViewController *)navigationController.visibleViewController;
verifyPasswordViewController = [[VerifyPasswordViewController alloc]
initWithNibName:#"VerifyPasswordViewController" bundle:nil];
[myCurrentController.view addSubview:verifyPasswordViewController.view];
This doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because navigationController.visibleViewController is not returning the viewController that is on the screen, as I intended it to. I've also tried navigationController.topViewController but it gives me the same results.
Also of note, all of the view controllers in the app are opened via presentViewController and are presented by a navigation controller. I have tried using the navigationController.presentedViewController property but this always returns null.
Would the way I'm doing it work if I could figure out how to get the correct reference to the current on screen view? Is there a better way I can accomplish my goal?
EDIT: Solved using Helge Becker's method. Perhaps not the cleanest way, but I set up the notification center like he suggested. Then I wrapped my notificationHandler in an if statement with the condition, (self.isViewLoaded && self.view.window) as a means to see if the view controller is visible on the screen.

Post a notification in the app delegate methods.
Let the viewcontrollers then register for the notification.
That will allow all viewcontroller respnd to any qpp condition change.
Usualy became active and will enter background are suffice.

Related

Observer for monitoring when view controllers' viewDidAppear have been executed

Summary of question
UINavigationControllerDelegate:didShowViewContoller makes it possible to get notified whenever any view controller has been displayed (as opposed to being loaded), provided its within the context of a navigation stack.
I want to know if such observation is possible for all view controllers if there isn't a navigation stack.
More background
I have an app where view controllers can suddenly appear based upon timers and local notifications firing, thus their appearance is effectively random.
If one VC triggers and gets displayed at the same time as another was in the process of getting displayed then there can be an issue (if you're experienced with iOS you'll be aware if one VC pushes another from within its viewDidLoad, rather than its viewDidAppear you will get an "attempting to present X on Y whose view is not in the window hierarchy" error)
How I solve this is I have a list of VCs to display and they get displayed by a view controller co-ordinator which implements UINavigationControllerDelegate's didShowViewContoller and doesn't display the new VC until didShowViewController has been invoked.
This works perfectly.
But now my problem is I want to do a similar thing for an app that isn't using a navigation controller, and thus I can't use UINavigationControllerDelegate:didShowViewController to observe globally when a view controller has been displayed. Does anybody know of another elegant mechanism for doing so?

Is there anyway I can find out the viewcontroller being shown on the screen in the app without using viewWillAppear/viewWillDisappear

I am trying to find the page the user is viewing at a given point of time. Is this possible without making any call from viewWillAppear or viewDidLoad. I have tried keywindow but it works only for navigation controller and it doesnt work as expected for tabBarController or a containerView.
Thank you.

Nil out a presentedViewController when UIApplication becomes active again

I have a presentedViewController on top of the root view controller when the app gets dismissed. (e.g. User navigates to another app or goes back to the home screen.)
I would like to nil it out when the user reactivates the app without it being visible to them. Calling -dismissViewControllerAnimated: is not an option because it only works if the view controller is visible, and I'd like to do it sooner and specifically only in application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation: and otherwise let the user continue their workflow in the modal view.
Are there any tricks I can use?
According to your comment, the only actual issue is what happens when the app receives application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation: and is thus brought to the front.
In that case, simply adjust your interface in application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation: - that is part of its purpose, to allow you to do that. You will be given some time before the "snapshot" is torn away, so if the adjustment involved is to dismiss an existing modal view, dismiss it without animation and there you are.
The user will still see the modal view for a moment, but not really - what the user is seeing is not your interface but the "snapshot" that was created by the system when the app when into the background. The "snapshot" is removed to reveal the actual interface (with a nice crossfade effect in iOS 7).
If the "snapshot" itself is problematic there are ways of preventing it from being taken, but it doesn't sound to me like this is that kind of situation.
(By the way, this raises the question of how the presented view is to know that it must be dismissed. The initial main action is in your app delegate, which is probably some conceptual distance away from the presented view. This would be an appropriate situation in which to use an NSNotification to communicate across this distance.)

Showing master view on some pages and preventing the user from hiding it

I have an iPad app with a UISplitviewController set as the root view controller of UIWindow. The master view controller (i.e. the view controller of the left view) is the UISplitViewController's delegate with the delegate method shouldHideViewController returns YES, this means when the app first launches the left view will be hidden and can be shown (and hidden) by the user gesture, i want to show the master view when i navigate to detail pages and prevent the user from hiding it using the gesture, i've tried to call shouldHideViewController method on the delegate to let it returns NO the second time it got called but this time it has no effect, the master view keeps hidden in detail pages and can be shown with the user gesture.
any ideas to achieve showing of the master view with this scenario would be highly appreciated.
This may only be a partial answer because I'm not sure what you mean that you call shouldHideViewController method on the delegate. My understanding is that only the UISplitView should call this method. If you call it, then it will not effect the UISplitView, because it wasn't what made the call. In other words, the delegate method is used by UISplitView to get some information (and allow you a place to do additional things to other stuff) but it is not used as a way to tell the UISplitView what to perform.
Having said that, at least for the gesture activation/deactivation, I would think that in splitViewController:shouldHideViewController:inOrientation: you could do something like
[svc setPresentsWithGesture:NO];
I don't see any way to programmatically tell the UISplitViewController to display or hide the master view controller because the delegate only tells it if it should proceed in presenting or hiding the master when it is going to try and do that. It does seem like there should be a way to do this though.

My iOS app complains about two-staged rotation but I'm not using it

I have to support down to iOS 4.3.
My app outputs in the console :
Using two-stage rotation animation. To use the smoother single-stage animation, this application must remove two-stage method implementations.
As far as I know I'm not using two-staged rotation. I just have this method in my view controllers :
- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {
return YES;
}
What else should I check in order to fix that?
Edit:
More precisions: my app uses a UITabbarController subclass. When the app starts, it checks if a user is logged in and then initiates the controllers of the tabbar controller if it's the case. If there's no user logged in, a modal view is presented (from the tabbar controller) the prompt the user to login and the controllers of the tabbar controller aren't initialized (yet). The "two-staged rotation" error is shown only at that moment and the rotation doesn't work.
So to summarize, the problem happens in that situation:
The rootViewController of the main window is the tabbar controller
The tabbar controller is empty (there are no view controller in the tabs and there's no tab)
A view controller is modally presented from the tabbar controller
OK I found a solution.
It seems like the presented modal view won't rotate until the viewControllers property of the UITabBarController is initialized. Since the concerned modal view is actually for login, I don't want to display anything behind it until the user is logged in because the views intended to be hold by the tabbar controller depend on the fact that a user is logged in.
So now just before presenting the modal view, I initialize the tabbar controller with a single, empty UIViewController and I remove it when the modal view is dismissed (i.e. a user logged in).
Perhaps it seems like a hack but it works well. And even if I don't understand why, it doesn't seem completely illogical that the tabbar controller doesn't behave like we want until it is fully initialized.
If someone has a better solution or explanation, feel free to comment :)
There aren't many posts regarding this error, so I'll admit my own shortcomings for the benefit of the next person so focused on the trees they might miss the forest. I found a missing
[super viewWillAppear:animated];
call inside my sub.

Resources