UISearchDisplayController Without Dimming? - ios

Question

I am writing a SplitView iPad app. Inside the DetailViewController, there's a little view that contains a UITableView and a UISearchBar and its controller. This view does not represent the whole screen space reserved for the DetailViewController. Actually, it uses just half of it. There's an UIImageView on the other half.
And this is where trouble comes in: every time I use the search bar, the displaycontroller (I assume) dims everything present inside the DetailViewController, including the image view. That is not consistent with what someone would expect when running the app. Is there any way to set the frame to be dimmed? Or at least disable dimming for good?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You are correct that it is the UISearchDisplayController that is managing the "dimming" effect that you're seeing.
What the UISearchDisplayController is doing is adding a UIControl as a subview to the view of the searchContentsController (a property of UISearchDisplayController), which is likely your detail-view controller. This UIControl is just an alpha'd view with a gray background. It seems to have a touch-up-inside event handler that ends searching when tapped.
To constrain the dimming effect to your sub-view of the detail-view, you need to do three things. (I'm assuming your detail-view-controller is defined via a xib. If not, these steps can be done in code too.)
1) add a new UIViewController to your detail-view-controller xib. Attach this new view-controller to an IBOutlet of your detail-view-controller. In my example I call this "_searchAreaViewController". This is important, even if you wont ever access the view controller (but remember, you'll have to release it at some point)
#interface DetailViewController : UIViewController <UIPopoverControllerDelegate, UISplitViewControllerDelegate, UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource> {
UIPopoverController *popoverController;
UIToolbar *toolbar;
id detailItem;
UILabel *detailDescriptionLabel;
IBOutlet UIViewController* _searchAreaViewController;
}
2) make the containing view for your search area the view of this new view-controller. To do this, use Interface Builder to set a new referencing outlet for this view by dragging the outlet to the searchAreaViewController and selecting the "view" outlet. You must have a containing view - it should be a subview of your detail-view, and it should contain the UISearchBar and likely your UITableView.
3) make the searchContentsController property of the UISearchDisplayController refer to this new view controller instead of the detail-view-controller. This can only be done via Interface Builder as the property is read-only (IB has some magic to make this work?) If you need to do this step via code you'll have to subclass the UISearchDisplayController and return the correct value from a property override of "searchContentsController".
I made a sample app to demonstrate this and the only line of code I had to add to the SplitView template was the one listed in step 1 above. Everything else was just adding the views/controllers and connecting them properly in IB.
good luck!

Answer 2

iOS 8+
[[UIView appearanceWhenContainedInInstancesOfClasses:#[NSClassFromString(#"UISearchDisplayControllerContainerView")]] setHidden:YES];
iOS 7
[View appearanceWhenContainedIn:NSClassFromString(#"UISearchDisplayControllerContainerView"), nil] setHidden:YES];
I know, that UISearchDisplayController is deprecated for now, but if you still need to use it, you can solve your issue with one line of code perfectly. Add it to viewDidLoad method.

Answer 3

Could you clarify what you mean by "use the search bar" and "dims everything present"? I interpret what you wrote in such a way that the keyboard pops up when you are about to enter text in the text field of the search bar. And that at this point the detail view is dimmed out, preventing user interaction.
The cause is that the search bar implements a modal dialog which prevents user interaction with the view as long as the keyboard is shown. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to configure the search bar to prevent this behavior. On the other hand I am not sure that the user won't expect this behavior since search bars are modal consistently and behave like this in general under iOS.
I have tried two work-arounds:
1.) There is a property of the UIViewController called modalPresentationStyle which produces exactly the behavior you describe if it has the value UIModalPresentationFormSheet ("All uncovered areas are dimmed to prevent the user from interacting with them.", see the Apple documentation). But setting this property to a different values does not change the result (at least for me it didn't work).
2.) You would need to write your own non-modal search bar replacement since a standard UITextField is non-modal and thus does not dim out any other UI elements. This approach works, but you might need a little more work to make it look like a "regular" search bar. But, again, since this search bar behaves differently from the modal normal search bars in iOS this might not really be what the users expect.

Answer 4

I know I am late and this is a horrible idea here, but 'setHidden:No' did not work for me.
-(void)searchBar:(UISearchBar *)searchBar textDidChange:(NSString *)searchText
{
BOOL hasBeenremoved = NO;
hasBeenremoved = [[[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] objectForKey:#"hasBeenremoved"] boolValue];
if (hasBeenremoved)
{
UIView* dimmingView = nil;
dimmingView = [[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] objectForKey:#"dimmingView"];
UIView* dimmingViewSuperView = nil;
dimmingViewSuperView = [[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] objectForKey:#"dimmingViewSuperView"];
[dimmingViewSuperView addSubview:dimmingView];
[[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] setObject:#NO forKey:#"hasBeenremoved"];
}
if ([searchText length] == 0 || [searchText isEqualToString:#""] )
{
[searchBar becomeFirstResponder];
[[[self primarySearchDisplayController] searchResultsTableView] reloadData];
[[[self primarySearchDisplayController] searchResultsTableView] setHidden:NO];
for( UIView *subview in self.view.subviews )
{
if([subview isMemberOfClass:[UIControl class]] ||
([[[subview class] description] isEqualToString:#"UISearchDisplayControllerContainerView"]))
{
for(UIView *subView2 in subview.subviews)
{
for(UIView *subView3 in subView2.subviews)
{
if (subView3.alpha < 1)
{
if ([[[subView3 class] description] isEqualToString:#"_UISearchDisplayControllerDimmingView"])
{
[[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] setObject:subView3 forKey:#"dimmingView"];
[[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] setObject:subView3.superview forKey:#"dimmingViewSuperView"];
[[[NSThread mainThread] threadDictionary] setObject:#YES forKey:#"hasBeenremoved"];
[subView3 removeFromSuperview];
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}