In complex screens (View Controllers) I used to separate the whole thing in smaller pieces (I call them widgets). These widgets consist basically of a MyWidget.h and a MyWidget.m file as well as a MyWidget.xib file, where the root element is a UIView and the MyWidget class is the File Owner of the UIView. In the init of this widget I do a loadNibNamed.
In my View Controller I then do a [[MyWidget alloc] init], which I add to View's Controller main view as a sub view. This, so far, works perfectly.
I'm now wondering, how to do the same with storyboard, because I cannot really start to drag in a UIView somewhere, I always have to start with an UIViewController, which I don't want to.
If there is no possible way doing this with a Storyboard, can I simply do it the old way, by using the Storyboard for my main screens and segues, and use a separate .xib file to define custom views?
Putting the widget/view in a separate .xib file works, and is appropriate especially if you might want to reference that same view from multiple View Controllers.
However, sometimes you do want to see the additional view/widget within the same storyboard, and it is possible. Here's how you do it:
Select your view controller in IB (click on the black bar below the view), then drag a UIView from the Object Library into the black bar:
When a view is in the black bar, it's instantiated like any other view in IB but just isn't added to your view hierarchy until you do so in code. Change the view's class to match your own subclass if necessary:
You can hook it up to your view controller like you would hook up any other view:
The added view shows up in your Document Outline and you can hook up actions and references there too:
Now, the problem that remains is that you can't actually see the view no matter how many times you try to click or double click, which would defeat the whole purpose of putting it in the same storyboard. Fortunately there are two workarounds that I know of.
The first workaround is to drag the view from the black bar back into your view controller's view, edit it, then drag it back into the black bar once you're done. This is troublesome but reliable.
The other workaround is more finicky, but I prefer it because it lets me see all my views at the same time:
Drag a UITableView from the Object Library into your newly added view.
Then drag a UITableViewCell into that UITableView.
Once you do that, your view pops out magically by the side, but you have a UITableView that you don't want. You can either resize that to 0x0, or you can delete it and your UIView will (usually) still stay visible.
Occasionally the secondary view will become hidden again in IB. You can repeat the above steps if you deleted the UITableView, or if the UITableView is still in the hierarchy you just need to click on the UITableViewCell and the view will appear again.
The second method works for UIViews but not so well for UIToolbars and is impossible for UIButtons, so the cleanest solution I've found when you need to include lots of different subviews is to attach a single secondary UIView to your view controller as a container that never gets shown, put all your secondary views in there, and use the UITableViewCell trick to make everything visible. I resize my dummy UITableView to 0x0 to make that invisible. Here's a screenshot of how it all looks like together:
If you're just looking to make your view controllers else-where(and not in your story-board), then there's a pretty simple way to accomplish this:
1) Create your CustomViewControllers(abcdController in the code I tried) with their individual xibs as usual.
2) Add a UIViewController(or whatever was the superclass of your CustomViewController) to the story-board.
3) Set the CustomClass to CustomViewController instead of UIViewController as shown here:
4) Finally, in your viewDidLoad, load the custom xib and you're done.
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:#"abcdController" owner:self options:nil];
// Do any additional setup after loading the view from its nib.
}
I think you can do something like this to get instance of specific viewcontroller from Storyboard and use view on top of it.
ex:
MyViewController* myViewController = [[UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"Main" bundle:nil] instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"myViewController"];
UIView* view = myViewController.view; //Get the view from your StoryBoard.
Hope this helps
Thanks
Vijay
Related
I have a UIViewController with a UITableView that is fed with data from the local database. When the user first launches the app (after installing) the table view is empty and I display a UIView in the middle of the table view that contains a UIImage, a UILabel and a UIButton (a call to action).
The first version of this view I built programmatically, which was no good to me because every time I tweaked something I had to build the app again. Then I switched to the storyboard but had to drag a UIView to the middle of my tableView. It is working now but I don't like the way it is, I can't edit my table view cells without having to move the UIView out of the table view.
I'd like to have a way to build this view entirely separated from my tableView (or even from my view controller in question) and then reference it in the viewDidLoad call of my view controller.
Unfortunately Xcode does not allow us to drag views directly to the storyboard so I'm pretty lost here.
Please tell me if I haven't been clear enough. I appreciate any help you could give me.
UPDATE: It'd be particularly awesome to me if I could also create a custom Swift class for this view of mine and reference it in the storyboard. And then in my viewDidLoad I could simply instantiate my custom view.
Thanks in advance.
Create a XIB file in which you can drag a view (without a view controller).
In your code you can load the XIB using NSBundle.mainBundle().loadNibNamed("MyXibName", owner:self, options:nil).
In the XIB file you can give the UIView a custom class (like you can do with view controllers in storyboard).
You then of course have to retrieve the view from the array returned by loadNibNamed and cast it to your custom class.
I am testing out something I would like to have in my app. I have a UiViewController in a storyboard that has a UIScrollView - I now want to add other viewControllers to this scrollView and swipe between them.
I would like to add a view that I made in the storyboard into this UIScrollView. Is it possible?
I tried something along the lines of:
MYViewController *viewOne = [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"myView"];
[self.scrollView addSubview:viewOne.view];
I've set the the scrollView size to be bigger than the screen and when the main view loads, I can see there is a scroll view (the scroll bars show) but my viewController is not inside it.
Anyone have any ideas?
The code you posted is still not right, on a couple of levels.
First, you should not use alloc/init for view controllers. You either need to use initWithNibName:bundle: (to create a view controller from a nib file) or instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier: to load a view controller from a storyboard.
Second, you should not add a view controller's view as a subview of another view controller unless you use the parent/child view controller support that was added in iOS 5 and greatly improved in iOS 6. If you do what you are doing then all sorts of things won't work correctly: Auto-rotation, low memory warnings, background notifications etc. The list of things that can go wrong is unbounded.
The easiest way to do this is to add a container view as a frame to hold your child view controller, and then control-drag from your container view onto the scene that you want to set up as a child. This causes IB to set up and "Embed" segue. Embed segues do all the housekeeping you need to host one view controller's content inside another, with no code needed.
You could create a container view inside your scroll view's content view, and then it would just work fine.
I found the problem:
I was not allocating and initialising my viewController. Ooops.
This is the correct code:
BaseViewController *viewOne = [[BaseViewController alloc]init];
viewOne = [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"myView"];
[self.scrollView addSubview:viewOne.view];
I've been trying to interpret the lessons from CS193P, and have a few questions.
I'm building views in code, the way I do it is I have a UIView subclass where I put all the views in place in the init method. This class is initialized by the ViewController.
The question is then, what is the right approach from here - say i want to animate a button I placed at 0,0 to 100,100. I'd like to animate it from the ViewController, but i don't like the fact that i set the 0,0 position in the UIView class (in the initializer) and now i am setting a new position in the ViewController. I'd prefer there would be just one place knowing about the actual (x,y) positions of my views.
How am i supposed to go about this?
Move the positions in the initializer to the ViewController
Put a method in my UIView "-(void)AnimateToSecondPosition" where the actual "second position" is then up to the view?
Just let it go. It seems like this would be the right approach if i had placed the button in interface builder - i consider interface builder to be the view then...
Or maybe even a fourth option?
Please help me understand it better and not just give me the right answer ;)
I'd like to be able to compare my approach in some way to how you would do it using interface builder, so each of my views are public and accessable from the controller - this way i believe i could easily start using interface builder instead if i wanted, without changing the controller code, just hooking up the outlets.
I'm guessing the case would be the same for disabling, hiding and doing other things with the views.
Thanks in advance.
If you want to create a new View programmatically you should generally instantiate it in your View Controller using its designated initialiser:
UIView *testView = [[UIView alloc]initWithFrame:myFrame];
If you create a custom view it's totally fine and correct to put some configuration code in the init method, but it's your ViewController that should be in charge of deciding what to do with this view - it is his job! Using the MVC the View and the Model should never communicate directly (as you definitely learned in the first lesson of CS193P).
Therefore the same apply to the animations. You should animate the Views within your ViewController and not implement the animation in the View itself.
Therefore in my opinion you "second position" should be setup by the VC - if this has to be done when something happens to the view (e.g. someone pressing a UIButton) you should set a target/action to your VC and handle this within your VC.
ADDED:
Regarding building UIViews in the Interface Builder I don't know what you mean by "and let them go". Interface builder will create the views and add them to the specific superviews at runtime - as you can see in the example below you control the view hierarchy graphically on the left. For instance in this case there is a UIView (which I coloured green for clarity) and two buttons. One is a subview of the main view while the other is a subview of the green UIView.
Once your ViewController is loaded the view hierarchy is automatically loaded to self.view - in fact if you run the following code in your VC when it is loaded you will see the list of self.views subviews in your console.
for (UIView *view in self.view.subviews){
NSLog("%#", [view description]);
}
If you know already that you need to change some attributes of a specific UIView you setup via Interface Builder (e.g. we know we want to change programmatically the color of the green UIView in the example above) you should create an outlet which allows you to have a reference to that view in your code. You do it by crtl-drag from the storyboard to your ViewController code - see the example below.
When you have done that you can refer in code to this as any other property, with the difference that it has been created by Interface Builder.
Hope this helps.
You can add an -setButtonFrameToSecondPosition to the view subclass, which simply updates the frame of the button, and then call that from the view controller via one of the +[UIView animate:...] methods.
I'v never used UITableViewControllers or UICollectionViewControllers, because you can have the same functionality by using UIViewController with its root UIView, then adding UITableView in xib or storyboard and assigning its delegate and datasource. And I also was able to put activity indicator inside the center of root UIView.
Now the things get a little bit complicated when using UICollectionViewController where its root view is UICollectionView. I need to update some code of other guys and they put activity indicator inside UICollectionView (in storyboard). The problem is this activity indicator gets hidden when cells are reused because activity indicator view is the most bottom one. I was unable to change visibility priority storyboard and also this code in view didLoad is not working:
[self.itemsCollectionView bringSubviewToFront:self.activityIndicator];
Because labels, images and etc. views of collection view cell are placed later, during collectionView:cellForItemAtIndexPath:. I could try to call bringSubviewToFront: in collectionView:cellForItemAtIndexPath: but that would be a wrong decision. Any ideas how to achieve this when using UITableViewControllers or UICollectionViewControllers?
IMHO the only reason to use UITableViewControllers or UICollectionViewControllers is because static cells are not shown storyboards when designing layout.
UPDATE It appears iOS wraps UICollectionView inside UICollectionViewControllerWrapperView. Tried to add activity to this wrapper view in viewWillAppear:
[self.itemsCollectionView.superview addSubview:self.activityIndicator];
But with no luck - activity indicator is still is below the cells.
I'v ended in refactoring existing UICollectionViewController in storyboards: I'v opened storyboard xml file with TextEdit, searched for the screen and changed its type from collectionViewController to viewController because was unable to find another way how to change the type of controller, though I hope there will appear some more elegant way for that in the nearest future. Then, I'v wrapped collectionView inside root view and placed activityIndicator inside this view. It's proven classical approach that works like a charm.
I'm trying to change the size of a tableView I have in interface builder and can't seem to. When I first started the app I could drag it around and stretch the sides but all of a sudden I can't adjust it. I tried to delete my tableView and add a new one but the same thing happened. Thanks in advance. Here's what I see when I try to change the size:
if your using a UIViewController you can drag and drop a tableView and can place in a custom position you want. but if your using a UITableViewController you cant move the tableView to your custom position. if you want to do it in UITableViewController you can do like below
if you want your tableView content should show from a point, that you want you can do this way,
[self.tableView setContentInset:UIEdgeInsetsMake(100,0,0,0)];
else if you want set your tableView to a frame in UITableViewController you do this way,
- (void) viewWillLayoutSubviews
{
[super viewWillLayoutSubviews];
self.tableView.frame = CGRectMake(0,100,320,300);
}
hope this will help you.
What kind of view controller are you using to manage your table view? Since you show "prototype cells", I'm guessing it's a UITableViewController. Those are built to fill the entire screen with a single table view (which has always annoyed me.)
Starting with iOS 6, though, you can create a "container" view in another view controler, and then drag an embed segue from your container view onto the table view controller. That does all the housekeeping to make the table view controller a child view controller of the other one, and then you can make it whatever size you want.
If you don't want to use a UITableViewController as a child of another view controller, you can use a regular view controller and wire up the data source and delegate methods yourself. However, things like static table views and prototype cells don't work then.
Hopefully this helps someone still coming across this problem. What I did was make sure the UIViewController had a UIView as its direct child, then dragged the UITableView as a child of the UIView, this allowed me to resize the UITableView.