R – How does Interface Builder know about UIViewController’s view

cocoa-touchinterface-builderiphoneuiviewuiviewcontroller

UIViewController has an ivar (and @property) called view. It is not however, an IBOutlet.

When creating a view nib in Interface Builder, you typically set File's Owner to be your UIViewController (or subclass thereof), and you wire the nib's view to File's Owner's view outlet.

How does this work if the UIViewController view member isn't an IBOutlet?

Best Answer

The IBOutlet keyword is used to indicate that a property should show up in Interface Builder for classes that you write. Interface Builder internally has additional knowledge about system provided classes.

If you are working with Interface Builder on the desktop, rather than iPhone, you can write Interface Builder Plug-Ins to integrate your custom classes into the Interface Builder Library (This is not supported in Interface Builder for the iPhone). In writing a plug-in, the plug-in author provides "class description" files that declare this same actions/outlets information to Interface Builder as one achieves with the IBAction/IBOutlet keywords. You can read more about it in the Interface Builder Plug-In Programming Guide.

It works essentially the same way for system provided classes as it does for plug-ins.

Related Solutions

Ios – How to load custom UITableViewCells from Xib files

The right solution is this:

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    UINib *nib = [UINib nibWithNibName:@"ItemCell" bundle:nil];
    [[self tableView] registerNib:nib forCellReuseIdentifier:@"ItemCell"];
}

-(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    // Create an instance of ItemCell
    PointsItemCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"ItemCell"];

    return cell;
}

R – Creating a navigation view in Interface Builder

I've had trouble doing things like this when I was getting started and the most workable approach I came up with was to create the UINavigationController programmatically. I adapted my code from the iPhone "utility" Xcode template. Here's a bit of it that will hopefully get you going: (edited for brevity; self is a UIViewController)

self.menuViewController = [[[MenuViewController alloc] 
                 initWithNibName:nil bundle:nil] autorelease];

self.navController = [[UINavigationController alloc] 
     initWithRootViewController:self.menuViewController];

self.navController.navigationBar.barStyle = UIBarStyleBlackOpaque;

[UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL];
[UIView setAnimationDuration:1];
[self.view addSubview:self.navController.view];
[UIView commitAnimations];

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ios – How to load custom UITableViewCells from Xib files

R – Creating a navigation view in Interface Builder

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