Is it a good practise to creates views in xcode and hide them and when required show them?
I am asking that because I prefer to create views visually and not in code.
If the view is to complex(a lot of subviews) should I create a new view controller to it?
I know there isn't a specify question here but I really need a clarification on this matter.
Regards
One of my first iOS applications had a tab bar and views that the user could switch between. Originally it was done by hiding and showing the right views depending on what the user pressed on the tab bar. This ended up being a complex disaster.
I then rewrote the app so that each tab bar view had its own UIViewController with its own set of views. That turned out to be so much easier to manage. (I also changed from using Interface Builder to straight code for creating the views, but that's beside the point and you can continue to use IB if you want.)
As for me, I prefer folowing practice:
Usually, a use storyboards,where views are placed, but if a view is complex, I create a separate XIB file, arrange all subviews there, and then in storyboard drag an UIView subclass and connect my XIB view with it.It helps to avoid mess in storyboard.
As for hiding views, I also don't recommend such practice as it can become very complex to understand your code and all those views are allocated when XIB is loaded, so the mobile developing rule "do as lazy as u can" is not met. We should try to spend as less memory as it's possible.
UIView is the best way to create iOS app, esp. if you want to reuse the code.
For example if you have same view to present in iPad n iPhone then using UIView can result in lots of similar code in View-controller
In another case if your view might need to have multiple table view it can be quite complex to handle each with delegates in ViewController. But separate view will solve this problem.
I have made my 1st open source code after learning how to use View
https://github.com/bishalg/BGRadioList
which I had learned from
http://www.raywenderlich.com/1768/uiview-tutorial-for-ios-how-to-make-a-custom-uiview-in-ios-5-a-5-star-rating-view
About the hiding view - I have used lots of hide and show view codes in my apps but believe me at one point it will become complex and unmanageable if you have lots of views.
Related
When a view controller (VC) has hordes of views and subviews it becomes very difficult to modify a subview because I can't even see it completely (it is hidden behind some other subview). For example please have a look at current state of one of my VC:
I can't see highlighted "Congratulations - UILabel" or its UIView.
Is there a way I can see a specific view clearly (may be at the top of all the other views)?
Generally I drag drop a UIView on a different dummy blank VC, design view completely on that VC with all constraints and finally drag drop it back to my actual VC. This works most of the times but it seems like an inefficient approach to me.
I've observed that seeing overlapping views used to be easier in iOS6 but it is Very difficult in iOS7. Is there any feature in iOS7 Interface Builder that I am missing? Thanks for your precious time.
Update: Would Spark Inspector help me here? I am newbie to development so don't want to waste my time trying and understanding new plugin if it doesn't help me achieve what I want. Thanks.
This is widely considered one of the weak points of Xcode's new Storyboards feature. They're great for apps that require a large number of simple controllers, but they become difficult to work with when your interfaces get complicated. Most experienced developers use Storyboards in some places and individual controller XIBs in others, depending on what they're building.
Here's how to solve your problem:
Step 1. Break the View Controller out of your Storyboard into it's own XIB
From the File menu, choose New File and choose an Empty XIB file (from the User Interface section). Name it "YourExactVCClassName.xib".
Go to your Storyboard. Copy the entire View of your View Controller and then delete it.
Paste the View Controller into your new XIB. Change the class of "File's Owner" to be your View Controller, and set it's "view" property by drawing an outlet from the view to File's Owner.
When your app runs, it will try to instantiate the view controller
from your storyboard. When it realizes there's no view in the
storyboard for that controller, it will automatically find the file
MyViewController.xib and load it from there.
Step 2. Organize the contents of your main view into detached views that make sense.
In your example above, it looks like you have different views for different states of the game (game over, high score, etc.) Take each of those and remove them from the main view. With your controller in it's own XIB file, you can just drag the view out in to the whitespace around your controller. Each view you drag out becomes a top level object in the XIB file that you can design and see easily.
You're no longer stuck with an iPhone-5-sized workspace.
Create IBOutlets for each of your detached, top level views so you can reference them in your controller.
In viewDidLoad, programmatically add each of the separate views to your main view. Note that you may want to set their frames, make some of them invisible, etc. You have to write more code, but it's generally worth it for an easily maintainable XIB.
I am a beginner at best when it comes to xcode, iOS, and objective-c. I have been working on a project that has had me looking up information a lot. I have already been learning a lot, but I realized lately that I have forming some bad practices.
I have used Storyboard to lay out the abstract view of the app. The first thing I noticed I was doing dealt with popover views for iPad. I did not know how to dismiss them via button press, so I was creating a new modal segue from the popover button back to the main view.
I realized that this was creating a new view and placing it over my existing view. This would start to chain until the program eventually crashed. Last night I learned the importance of delegates and how they can help me gracefully dismiss the popover view.
Based on the documentation I have read for modal views, it appears that I need to be dismissing those types of views as well.
My question regards to proper practice when building an app. What if I have a ViewController that has 10 buttons, each of which will spawn a popover that is similar yet features slightly different content. Is it OK to create 10 new views in storyboard and drag and drop the UI elements on there? This means that the main view controller is going to have 10 delegates, one for each.
OR would it be best to create one general view, load the content dynamically, and only worry about one delegate in the presenting view controller?
EDIT: As far as the differences between them, they each have a list of labels (questions) and a UISegmentedControl to match the label. This will allow the user to fill out a survey. There are currently 10 views because I have 10 sets of questions that I feel deserve different views. At the bottom of each view there are 4 buttons. Every view must include these 4 buttons.
It's "ok" but not practical to have those 10+ delegates. If these ViewControllers only differ slightly - have you considered creating a "base" view controller and then adding/updating some of the differences programmatically depending on the content? I think it all depends on what you want to display and how much these differ. I would definitely not recommend 10+ delegates all delegating back to the same controller.
Basically, I'm saying yes to your "OR" question.
I have a ViewController (with navigation) that needs to show 7 different content layouts. I want to keep the same background and nav, the only thing that needs to change is the central UIView.
If I have 7 different UIViews on the same xib/storyboard, can I hide the ones I'm not using or will that ding performance?
Using segues won't work either because they make a mess out of my custom navigation and animations.
Is there a better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? Thanks for suggestions
solution
My design is too custom for using view controller containment so I decided to mimic the idea with a custom UIViewController and two UIViews. It's not too bad and it works rather quickly.
You should look into using view controller containment, then you can load your views from separate nib files and still provide your custom navigation and animations from your container view controller.
Note: This is only really supported from iOS 5.
Generally, it's a good idea to unload views that aren't visible, however, if your views aren't using too much memory (and/or cpu time) hiding them when they're not in use should work fine.
View controller containment is probably what you should be doing if each view has its own unique functionality (i.e. view 1 is a map, view 2 shows some about text, view 3 is an image gallery). UITabBar might be useful, but it depends on your app.
The performance hit would depend on your views' contents. If you haven't done so already, invest some time into learning how to use Instruments (apple's diagnostic tool). Watching the video titled "Optimizing App Performance with Instruments" in the developer resources would be a good start.
My design is too custom for using view controller containment so I decided to mimic the idea with a custom UIViewController and two UIViews. It's not too bad and it works rather quickly.
Background
I'm using interface builder to create the UI for an app I'm working on. The app has a single screen that displays a series of buttons. Clicking on a button displays an associated view which overlays the buttons. Clicking another button hides the previous overlay view and displays another one.
Too make managing the UI easier in IB I've decided to create multiple nib files for each sub view that is to appear when clicking the relevant button. I'm then loading the sub view's nib file in the view controller's viewDidLoad method using the UINib class.
The idea behind this was to avoid having multiple views stacked on top of each other in a single nib file as this would be hard to manipulate in IB. I could have created all the views in code but this would require a lot of tedious coding as the layouts of each sub view are quite complex (with multiple child views).
Example code loading a sub view from a nib file.
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
UINib *aSubViewNib = [UINib nibWithNibName:#"aSubView" bundle:nil];
NSArray *bundleObjects = [aSubViewNib instantiateWithOwner:self options:nil];
// get root view from bundle array
UIView *aSubView = [bundleObjects objectAtIndex:0];
[self.view addSubview:aSubView];
...
The code above is repeated for the other views.
To summarise I have a single screen iPhone app that has layered views that are shown/hidden by clicking buttons. This is achieved with a single view controller with an associated nib file and a series of additional nib files for the sub views which are loaded in the view controller's viewDidLoad method.
Questions!
Sorry for the long introduction but I wanted to be very clear what it is I am doing.
Is my approach bad or unusual?
Are there any potential issues to doing it this way?
What have other people done when they need a dynamic interface and
still want to keep everything in Interface Builder?
Notes
Before anyone asks why don't I just display the sub views on a new screen and use the navigation bar, let me say that I have very good reasons and I do understand iOS UI guidelines. The above use case is not exactly my use case but it's one that clearly describes the problem without getting bogged down in my development app.
Also I know I could have written all the sub views as code but each sub view has a complex layout of child views and it would be a lot of code and messing around to try and get them looking right.
Thanks in advance.
There isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between view controllers and views. Most views contain many subviews, which are views themselves, so this literally doesn't make sense.
However, depending on the complexity of the views (including their content), you may want separate view controllers... or not.
For example, if you have two sbuviews that are each tableViews, you may want to have one view controller for each tableView. This is because each tableView is looking at the same delegate methods, and if they are in the same viewController, then the delegate methods have to differentiate between the tableViews. The delegate methods have signatures that allow this, but, in my experience, it can really make for a messy code design that is hard to follow and hard to manage.
On the other hand, you may have two tables that are managed by the same viewController, where one table is filled with meaningful data and the other is simply a place holder (as when the data source is empty). One might be visible while the other is not. Why make you life complicated by creating two view controllers when both are driven by the same data source (the model)?
In my mind, it comes down to how difficult it is to follow and manage the code. If the complexity of using a single view controller becomes burdensome, consider using more view controllers.
UPDATE
By the way, I have an example that I am currently working with that may illustrate a similar situation. In the InAppSettingsKit, that a lot of developers use, there are several xib files for pieces of the main view. You can look at the structure here on github. There is one main view controllers and several xib files. (There is also what I would call a "helper" view controller and an email composer view controller.) In this example, the xib files may be used multiple times to specify the layout of table view cells. There is no view controller for each xib file, though. (The documentation for InAppSettingsKit is sparse, so these things may not be obvious just by taking a quick look at it.)
Every View should have a corresponding UIViewController. Using one ViewController to "Control" more than one view breaks the MVC paradigm. "Controlling" multiple "views" from one controller will make it much harder to change one thing without breaking something else. The choices you make on how to present the content to the end user will be different for every individual. So if you say a NavigationController won't work in your case, maybe a Modal view is the answer or, you might just instantiate your custom UIViewControllers and add them to your view ([addSubview:]), if thats the road you want, but like I said, it would be beneficial for you to make a "controller" for each view object along with the corresponding xib. If you need information sent back, use a delegate or use Notifications to send the message back to the parent view. I learned the hard way that not following MVC paradigm, will make you life miserable. Try and keep your code as decoupled as possible. And read up on the MVC design pattern, you won't regret it.
actually its possible to do this.
Open your .xib file,select File’s Owner(in placeholder) -> "identity inspector" (utilities) -> change class name to your controller classname -> press control and drag file's owner placeholder to View object, select "view" in dialog.
Now you can customize your view.
p.s. you can use the same outlets as first xib, you need only to drag them to the new xib(+control sure).
here is an explained tutorial:
http://irawd.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/how-to-link-a-xib-file-to-a-class-and-use-2-xib-files-for-iphone4-and-iphone5/
I would like to develop an application for iPad, using a layout like that shown in this link:
https://skitch.com/sparkoletto/g13ck/ipad-views-layout
As you can see in the image on one page I would like to insert a UITableView (B), two UIScrollView (one vertical (D) and one horizontal (A)) and a simple UIView (C).
What is the best way to develop such interfaces?
It 'best to use a single ViewController that manages all the views that I need, or create a ViewController for each view, and then combine them all together in another UIViewController?
Thanks
I disagree with #TomSwift. When these things get complicated, it's very helpful to break them out into their own view controllers. You'll create a view controller of the correct type and then [self.view addSubview:vc.view] at some point.
The problem with making one complicated view controller is that it becomes delegate and datasource for too many things that are internal details of individual subviews. Your delegate methods now need to check which tableview is talking to them, for instance.
Splitting them up also makes it much easier to manage rotation, particularly if you want a different set of views displayed in each orientation. This is good for memory management as well, since the VCs can automatically unload the views you aren't using anymore.
Breaking things up too small is of course also a problem. There is a cost to having separate view controllers, especially if they interact with each other. Having a good feel for when is the right time is the mark of an experienced developer. But for the view you showed, I would almost certainly break it up. Your situation looks very much like UISplitViewController.
Likely a single view controller, IMO, unless you plan to reuse some of these panes in other places. In which case you could implement a "container view controller" with a single view to handle the layout of the child view controllers.
Typically view controllers manage "full screen" (or nearly full screen) views. The exceptions are fairly rare - UISplitViewController is one.