I'm trying to accomplish switching views without using a navigation controller, tab bar controller etc. I am currently accomplishing this using Cocos2d director class replaceScene method. My application will need to have around 40 view controllers, each with a few UIButtons that could take them to any other view controller.
For instance View controller 1 may have buttons that take you to view controller 2
View Controller 2 may have buttons that link to 3,4,5,12
view controller 4 may need to link to view controller 17, 5 and 3
Every tutorial and bit of documentation I've read only discusses using Navigation Controllers, Tab bars or pushing views modally. None of these solutions fits my particular requirements.
Cocos2d has the "replaceScene" method which does exactly what I need, but mixing the many UIKit controls that I need makes developing this entire project in Cocos2d a nightmare.
I'm looking for something where I can have the user tap a button which will load a specified view controller/view transition to that view, and unload the previous view controller from memory. Any ideas?
Have a root view controller which has references of your view controllers. Also make a weak reference to the root view controller in each view controller, as in a delegate pattern. If one of the view controllers wants to make a view transition, send a message to the root view controller. Let the root view controller hide the current view and unhide the next view, using an animation if you want.
Basically you are implementing a view container much simpler than UINavigationController and UITabBarController. You could probably achieve the same thing using the tab bar controller and hide the tab bar view, but I would implement a custom one.
Related
A little confused on how to implement this into my main view controller. The example project shows it as a navigation controller, but I wasn't able to add an existing class on a fresh navigation controller or my current UIViewController. I could just be implementing it wrong though. Much appreciation if I can gain some traction on how to work with these.
If you could share some code that would be great.
How things work:
Navigation Controllers
There are currently 4 different Navigation Controllers that each offer their own features. The controllers can be used individually, or together.
SideNavigationViewController
The SideNavigationViewController offers 3 bodies to display content: mainViewController, leftViewController, and rightViewController.
MainViewController
The mainViewController must always exist, and has a facility for transitioning between view controllers using the transitionFromMainViewController method. Using this method is as easy as passing a UIViewController in its first parameter.
sideNavigationViewController?.transitionFromMainViewController(InboxViewController())
There are further parameters that allow for animations, completions, etc... to be set when transitioning between view controllers.
LeftViewController and RightViewController
The leftViewController and rightViewController can be set only once. To make them dynamic, you would need to use another Navigation Controller as its view controller.
NavigationBarViewController
The NavigationBarViewController offers a NavigationBarView along side the ability to manage two UIViewControllers, the mainViewController and the floatingViewController.
MainViewController
The mainViewController is like the SideNavigationViewController's mainViewController, and has a transitionFromMainViewController method that transitions from view controller to view controller in the body portion of the NavigationBarViewController.
FloatingViewController
The floatingViewController is a modalViewController and when set, it pops over MainViewController and NavigationBarView. Setting that value is like so:
navigationBarViewController?.floatingViewController = InboxViewController()
To close and hide the floatingViewController set it to nil, like so.
navigationBarViewController?.floatingViewController = nil
SearchBarViewController
The SearchBarViewController offers a single transitioning mainViewController, as well, has a SearchBarView at the top. Transitioning the mainViewController is like so:
sideNavigationBarViewController?.transitionFromMainViewController(InboxViewController())
MenuViewController
The MenuViewController is another controller that has a mainViewController, which takes the entire screen. Floating above it, is a MenuView that is used to transition between mainViewControllers.
menuViewController?.transitionFromMainViewController(InboxViewController())
Final Notes
These Navigation Controllers can be used in any combination and any amount of times creating a robust and intricate stack of controllers that act like one.
I hope this helps :)
I would like to make a layout with a sidebar that can have widgets from different modules. Lets say there shall always be a login widget at the top if the user isn't logged in then it shall show user info. The getting started album guide could use it to display the latest albums and so on, i hope you understand how i want to use the sidebar.
Could it be done with a config file in autoload and a small code that read that config and calls the widgets on every page load?
There are several ways of page composition in Zend Framework 2:
1. Switching between Layouts
By default, ZF2 provides you with a single layout template layout.phtml.
In real-life applications, you will probably need to have several layouts
and switch the layout for certain controller/action. In each of your layouts, you will be able to show different widgets/sidebars.
2. Partial Views
A partial view is a .phtml view template file which can be rendered by another
view template. Partial views allow to compose your page of pieces and reuse pieces
of view rendering logic across different view templates. This is accomplished through the Partial view helper.
3. Placeholder View Helper
The Placeholder is another useful view helper allowing for capturing HTML
content and storing it for later use. Thus, analogous to the Partial
view helper, it allows to compose your page of several pieces.
4. Forward Controller Plugin
With the Forward controller plugin, you are able to call an action (for example, the action rendering some widget) from another module/controller from your controller and grab the output of that action. Then you are able to incorporate that output into your page.
5. Use View Models for Page Composition
When you write action methods for the controller classes, you use the ViewModel
class as a variable container for passing the variables from controller to view template,
and for overriding the default view template name. But, actually the ViewModel class is more than just a variable container plus view template name. In fact, it is closely related to the layout and page composition.
The third big capability of the view model class is that it allows for combining several
view models in a tree-like structure. Each view model in the tree has the associated
view template name and data variables that can be passed to the view template to control
the process of rendering.
This feature is internally used by Zend Framework 2 when "combining" the layout view template and the view template associated with the controller's action method. ZF2 internally creates the view model for the layout template and assigns it with layout/layout view template name. When your controller's action method returns the ViewModel object, this object is attached as a child to the layout view model.
So, you can attach your own view models to the default view model to render the page of pieces that you want.
Currently in my app I have this design:
-- DialogViewController 1
-----DialogViewController 2
--------DialogViewController 3
-----------TabBarController
--------------DialogViewController4
--------------DialogViewController5
--------------DialogViewController6
--------------DialogViewController7
Problem with this is that dialog view controllers 4-7 breaks the monotouch dialog flow (so to speak), because of TabBarController in between. When I create dialog view controllers 4-7 I need to create new Root in their constructors which I don't need to for DVC 1-3.
With this approach certain things like radio groups don't work inside DVC 4-7 e.g it will display the radio group selection, but there is no navigation bar at the top.
My question is what can I do to solve this? Can I use TabBarController inside DVC somehow if that makes sense? Or how can I "hook" DVC 4-7 back to main "circuit"?
Thanks in advance.
According to the iOS HIG
A tab bar appears at the bottom edge of the screen and should be
accessible from every location in the app
which implies that it should be the root, not nested inside another controller.
It seems that a UIWebView included in a view controller that is in a split view controller, the web view reports itself as being in portrait mode, with a 768-px-wide viewport from the standpoint of CSS3 media queries.
I have built a couple of minimal-test-case apps to reproduce this bug/feature. It is not present when the web view is in a view controller that is the root view of the window. It is also not present if the split view controller is inside a tab bar controller. You can even place the web-view-bearing view controller inside a tab bar controller inside the detail pane of the split view controller and avoid this bug.
However, I would like to simply have a split view controller that is the root view of the window and includes a detail view controller that nonetheless properly honors media queries. Does anyone know of a way to achieve this?
I've tried:
overriding the detail view controller's parentViewController property (returning nil)
overriding the detail view controller's splitViewController property (ditto)
overriding the detail view controller's didRotateToInterfaceOrientation method
overriding the detail view controller's willRotateToIntefaceOrientation method
I'm investigating:
using a different media query
using a third-party split-view replacement (e.g. MGSplitViewController)
manually injecting the appropriate stylesheet with JavaScript
If anyone has run into this issue and figured out a solution, please let me know.
It turns out that it's not the split view controller per se (or the tab bar controller, for that matter) that's causing the portrait/landscape mixup.
Basically if a UIWebView is taller than it is wide, the OS considers it in portrait mode, and if it's wider than it is tall, the OS considers it in landscape mode.
The presence of a tab bar controller was enough to make the height (768 - 20 - 49 = 699) just smaller than the width (1024 - 320 - 1 (gutter) = 703).
my question is about view controllers, delegates and all that in general. I feel perfectly comfortable with UIView, UIViewController, Delegates and Sources, like UITableView does for instance. It all makes sense.
Now I have implemented my first real custom view. No XIBs involved. It is an autocomplete address picker very much like in the Mail application. It creates those blue buttons whenever a recipient is added and has all the keyboard support like the original.
It subclasses UIView. There is no controller, no delegate, no source. I wonder if I should have either one of those? Or all, to make it a clean implementation.
I just cannot put my finger on the sense a view controller would make in my case. My custom view acts much like a control and a UIButton doesn't have a controller either.
What would it control in my view's case?
Some of my thoughts:
For the source: currently the view has a property "PossibleAutocompleteRecipients" which contains the addresses it autocompletes. I guess this would be a candidate for a "source" implementation. But is that really worth it? I would rather pass the controller to the view and put the property into the controller.
The selected recipients can be retrieved using a "SelectedRecipients" property. But views should not store values, I learned. Where would that go? Into the controller?
What about all the properties like "AllowSelectionFromAddressBook"? Again, if I compare with UIButton, these properties are similar to the button's "Secure" property. So they are allowed to be in the view.
The delegate could have methods like "WillAddRecipient", "WillRemoveRecipient" and so on and the user could return TRUE/FALSE to prevent the action from happening. Correct?
Should I maybe inherit from UIControl in the first place and not from UIView?
And last but not least: my custom view rotates perfectly if the device is rotated. Why don't all views? Why do some need a controller which implements ShouldAutoRotateToDeviceOrientation()?
Does it make sense what I wrote above? In the end I will provide the source on my website because it took me some time to implement it and I would like to share it as I have not found a similar implementaion of the Mail-App-like autocomplete control in MonoTouch.
I just want to learn and understand as much as possible and include it in the source.
René
I can answer part of your question.
I just cannot put my finger on the
sense a view controller would make in
my case
The ViewController is responsible for handling the View's state transitions (load, appear, rotate, etc) These transitions are used mainly when you use a navigation component (UINavigationViewController, UITabBarController). These components needs to received a ViewController that will handles the view's transitions.
For exemple, when you push a ViewController on a UINavigationViewController, it will cause the ViewDidLoad, ViewWillAppear, ViewDidAppear. It will also cause the ViewWillDisappear, ViewDidDisappear of the current ViewController.
So, if your application has only one portrait view, you don't need a ViewController. You can add your custom view as a subview of the main window.