Suppress moreNavigationController in custom UITabBarController

Question

I have implemented a custom UITabBar solution for a project. Essentially, if there are more than 5 items, I use a scrollView that will allow the user to scroll through the addit

Answer 1

You may also override the moreNavigationController var of UITabBarController and return your own custom NavigaitonContorller like so:

override var moreNavigationController: UINavigationController { return MyCustomNavController() }

worked in my case where I needed a NavigaitonController that allowed hiding the NavigationBar when scrolling.

As for hiding the Back Button of the MoreNavigationController you can set the leftBarButtonItem of each NavigationItem to anything (even an empty UIBarButtonItem) and the back butotn of the more NavigaitonController will disappear.

Answer 2

This is how I ended up fixing this:

- (void) setSelectedViewController:(UIViewController *) selectedViewController {
    self.viewControllers = [NSArray arrayWithObject:selectedViewController];
    [super setSelectedViewController:selectedViewController];
}

Basically any tab from 5 on gets its navigation controller replaced by the moreNavigationController when you intiially set the viewControllers on UITabBarController. Therefore, I dynamically set viewControllers to just contain the tab I'm clicking. There never ends up being more than 1 in this case so the moreNavigationController doesn't come into play.

When I init my custom controller, I just supply the first tab as the viewControllers so the application can load.

- (id) init {
    self = [super init];
    if (self) {
        self.delegate = self;
        [self populateTabs];
    }
    return self;
}

- (void) populateTabs {
    NSArray *viewControllers = [self.manager createViewsForApplication];
    self.viewControllers = [NSArray arrayWithObject:[viewControllers objectAtIndex:0]];
    self.tabBar.hidden = YES;
    MyScrollingTabBar *tabBar = [[MyScrollingTabBar alloc] initWithViews:viewControllers];
    tabBar.delegate = self;
    [self.view addSubview:tabBar];
}

For clarity, the tabBar delegate is set to this class so that it can respond to tab clicks. The delegate method is as follows:

- (void) tabBar:(id) bar clickedTab:(MyScrollingTabBarItem *) tab {
    if (self.selectedViewController == tab.associatedViewController) {
        [(UINavigationController *) tab.associatedViewController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES];
    } else {
        self.selectedViewController = tab.associatedViewController; 
    }
    // keep nav label consistent for tab
    self.navigationController.title = tab.label.text;
}