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Showing a modal view with a navigation bar

January 9th, 2010

This took me about an hour to figure out so I’m blogging it. I was interested to show a modal view with a navigation bar at the top. I wanted the navigation bar so as to put a descriptive title for the modal view. I read one solution here which is to use a label to show the title. But I kind of like the look of navigation bars at the top. Besides, the HIG from Apple shows a modal view with a navigation bar so I think showing the title this way is an accepted approach.

I added a navigation bar in the Xib file but the navigation bar was not showing in the modal view. I fiddled with some other options with no luck. Thanks to this discussion which showed me the right way.

What I did was change my original code,

DatePickerViewController *datePickerViewController = [[DatePickerViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"DatePickerViewController" bundle:nil];
[self presentModalViewController:datePickerViewController animated:YES];

to this,

DatePickerViewController *datePickerViewController = [[DatePickerViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"DatePickerViewController" bundle:nil];
 UINavigationController *navigationController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:datePickerViewController];
[self presentModalViewController:navigationController animated:YES];

and my modal view has,

- (void)viewDidLoad {
 [super viewDidLoad];
 self.title = @"Set date and time";
}

I still don’t understand why adding the navigation bar in the Xib file did not work. Maybe there is something more fundamental I am missing. I’ve spent too much time on this already though, time to move on!

Posted in: Objective C, iPhone