I am having a hard time wording this when searching the internet so I am just going to ask the question.
I have an options view in my app that slides into view when the user clicks a button. This options view will display app information like settings. I want this options view to be displayed on every view controller in my app. I do not want to copy and paste the code for the options view into every viewcontroller file. The options view has quite a few outlets and actions and also calls many delegates.
How can I reuse this options view in all my view controllers without adding all the outlets, actions, and delegate methods each time?
I was going to make a new file with public methods, but I would still have to copy the outlets. Would this public methods file have to include delegate methods as well then?
Let me know if my question does not make sense. I am hoping there is a standard way of implementing something like this.
You can just have the options view be the view of an options view controller, and show it modally from any view controller you want. Is there some reason you're not doing it this way? This is the usual way to do this, not by having a view that you reuse in different controllers.
Add the options as a subview of the window, then make your App Delegate handle all of the options view's outlets
Related
If inserting the snippet code for checking and displaying the default view in the case of no internect connect at the beginning of viewWillAppear: method of each view controllers, it would make the ton of boilerplate code. So, I'd like to ask:
Is there a way to centralize this snippet code in one place and automatically inject into any of view controllers right after be called to display.
In the case of no internet connection, how to display the default view instead of the view of view controller?
First you have a to create a seperate view for 'No Internet screen'.
Create a BaseViewController in which, you will add a logic of hide/show no internet screen.
And all your apps viewcontroller are derived from this 'BaseViewController' and initialize this 'No Internet screen' and hide/show depends of internet Or API fails
Thats it.
Simple make a BaseViewController in which you implement the code to show or not the NoInternetConnection message.
It can be a simple UILabel that you add on top of other views.
Then inherit this class when you create a view controller that needs this common behavior.
You could create a placeholder view for no net connection state,
and you should think about easy to use for you and others, that's all.
There is a demo for you:https://github.com/liaodalin19903/LMLNonetAnimationPlaceholderView
You can learn how to create a better more no net connection placeholder VIEW
I'm new to Swift, so I apologize for my lack of knowledge of almost anything related to Swift.
Right now, I'm developing an app that uses the ARSlidingPanel library, so now there are two ViewControllers present on the screen (Main view, with the dark background, and Panel view, which is the green background). I want to be able to set vars/call functions from the Panel view to the Main view. For example if I click a button in the panel view, I want to display some text in the main view. Right now I've started with using static vars but from my knowledge of Java/Android, I know this is probably not the right way to go. Any tips for a cleaner/more acceptable way of doing things?
There are a few different options here. However, the first thing that comes up to mind is if you really need to use two independent view controllers for the same view?.
One solution would be to use delegates. Write a swift protocol that has has the methods and functionality you want to expose, for example setting up values in the view controller's outlets, then implement the protocol in one view controller. In your other view controller, you can then create a delegate variable of type UIViewController -let delegate: UIViewController - and use that instance of your delegate to modify the view. Here's a guide on this
Even better, you can add view controllers as sub view controllers
of your view, apple provides a good bit of documentation on this, you
can find it
here.
Hope this helps.
I'm keeping on developing an iPhone app (rigth now native one) and I would need to use a common "header" for all views but I don't want/need a UINavigationBar and prefer much more have a common "partial view". It will have some actions to perform but always the same ones (showing notifications panel, basically). It should be something like you can see in the screenshots.
I don't need (I feel) delegation because the controller's view can handle notifications and show them when user clicked the customize button.
I don't mind to use a Nib o make the view hardcoded but I'm not sure how I must make an instance of the view or the controller that handles it within each app tab (I'm using UITabBar as navigation control).
From my point of view it doesn't exist a way to get a common controller to call wherever needed; you just can use some method to present new controller as modal o push it out and I think that is not what I'm looking for.
Any idea is welcome. Thanks
Create a custom view controller with 2 subviews. Subview 1 is the header. Subview 2 is the container view where child view controllers are displayed (your tab bar controller in this case).
Your custom view controller could be the delegate of the tab bar controller if you want, so it can be notified when the tabs change and update anything on the header view.
Well, finally is have used the solution I found on the link http://patientprogrammer.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/re-usable-subviews-in-ios/
I have created a Nib with a view controller and then, in the main window I have added two view, the top one subclasses the view controller for the Nib view and it is rendered automatically when app is launched without a single line of code within "main" controller. See the screenshots for more detail:
Thank you very much for your help
I just came across a slide-in menu I really like: https://github.com/uzysjung/UzysSlideMenu
I would like to use this menu for an application that uses several view controllers (UIViewControllers and UINavigationControllers).
In Xcode, I created a single view application and made the view controller (MenuViewController) show the menu, like the creator did in his example project. I added more view controllers to the storyboard and connected them via segues to the MenuViewController. Upon selecting a menu item, these segues are triggered and the selected view is shown - so far so good.
But now, I run into the following problem:
All my view controllers are shown in full screen. That means that VCs that get segue'd in the viewport don't show the menu, because it's just not implemented there. I could put the menu in every VC, but that doesn't seem to be the right way to do it (even if I use some custom delegate method that every controller calls, like putMenuInViewController:(UIViewController *)target). I think I need something like a global singleton for the menu and make it appear in every view controller, but I have absolutely no idea on how to it or what to google for.
Any points into the right direction are greatly appreciated :)
I think you need to implement one root view controller with this menu as singleton, and add other view controller as child view controller to it.
I wrote a post about it, you can find it here:http://antrix1989.blogspot.com/2013/09/uiviewcontroller-as-singleton.html
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/