MonoTouch for iPad: How to show a popup dialog? - ipad

Question

I just started learning developing an application (primarily) for iPad using MonoTouch. Maybe because of my many years experience in C# world, it makes my switch very difficult, and I feel stupid sometimes. This is very simple thing in C#, but it make me scratch my head...
Popup dialog?
For iPhone, you rarely have this requirement, because whatever you show will occupy the whole screen, so you just create a controller for each popup.
For iPad, I have much more space, and I don't want the whole screen to be occupied with a few controls (e.g. login screen). That's why I want to show it as a popup. I have seen this in other iPad apps.
From what I learned, I need to use UIAlertView or UIActionSheet to do this. But what I don't understand is that, as shown by all the examples I have read, you have to create all the controls from the code.
What I would like to do is to create the UI using IB, and plug it into UIActionSheet. Is it possible? How do I do it?

Answer 1

If this is an iPad-only application, you will want to use a UIPopoverController. This is a popup "window" that contains a view and is linked to an area on the screen, such as a toolbar button or a rectangle (such as the Frame of a UIButton).
To use this, create a new instance of UIPopoverController, using the constructor that accepts a UIViewController and pass the view that you want to show.
Due to garbage collection considerations, make sure that you store the UIPopoverController in a class-level property.
You will probably also want to clean up this property when the popover is closed. To support this, we subclassed the UIPopoverController, added an event that can be hooked by the caller, then overrode the Dismiss method and fire the hooked event, if any, in the overridden method.
Once you instantiate the popover, you will want to show it. You can do this through one of the PresentFromxxx methods. If you are presenting this from a button (not toolbar) you can call PresentFromRect using the button's frame as the rectangle.
The view that is presented can control its size by setting the ContentSizeForViewInPopover property in its ViewDidLoad method.

Answer 2

You can't edit a UIActionSheet or UIAlertView from Interface Builder.
What you can do is create a view in Interface Builder and display it modally over top of your other views, however it sounds like you don't want to occupy the entire screen and this is what would happen. Here is an example of a modal view controller: http://pastebin.com/h221BQdK
I think you should just follow the examples you mention and create a UIAlertView from code, maybe put it a static utility class. I created a MessageBox class to be more like windows, but you can also put text boxes on there for login. Look at the login box on the app store, it is a decent example of what it would look like.

Answer 3

Create a viewcontroller named extraviewcontroller set its height width to 300 * 215 .
and write the code below
inviewdidload
pickerviewTitle = [[UIPickerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,0, 383, 250)];
pickerviewTitle.delegate = self;
pickerviewTitle.tag = 0;
pickerviewTitle.showsSelectionIndicator = YES;
controller = [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"ExtraViewController"];
popovercontroller = [[UIPopoverController alloc] initWithContentViewController:controller];
popovercontroller.delegate = self;
then
UIActionSheet *actionSheet1 = [[UIActionSheet alloc] initWithTitle:#"Title" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:#"Done" destructiveButtonTitle:nil otherButtonTitles:nil];
actionSheet1.tag = 0;
actionSheet1.actionSheetStyle = UIActionSheetStyleDefault;
[actionSheet1 addSubview:pickerviewTitle];
[actionSheet1 setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 600, 400)];
[controller.view addSubview:actionSheet1];
if ([popovercontroller isPopoverVisible]) {
[popovercontroller dismissPopoverAnimated:YES];
} else {
//the rectangle here is the frame of the object that presents the popover,
//in this case, the UIButton…
CGRect convertedFrame = yourclickbutton.frame;
[popovercontroller presentPopoverFromRect:convertedFrame
inView:self.view
permittedArrowDirections:UIPopoverArrowDirectionRight
animated:YES];
}