NavigationController Right to Left in iOS

Question

I am buiding a Right to Left navigation controller to support RTL Languages. After reading some posts in StackOverFlow Push ViewController from Right To Left with UINavigationCo

Answer 1

Inspired by the solutions from @locke I rewrote the code as follows:

1- Define a UIViewController in the appdelegate called preViewController to hold the master view controller.

2- To reference it in the view controllers use the:

AppDelegate *appdelegate=(AppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];

3- write the following masterviewcontroller as follows:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    //create a mutable arry to hold the view controllers and copy the current list of navigation controllers
    //at this point there is only the current view controller in stack

    NSMutableArray *vcs =  [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:self.navigationController.viewControllers];

    //create a detailed navigation controller
    DetailedViewController *DVC = [[DetailedViewController alloc]initWithNibName:@"DetailedViewController" bundle:nil];

    //create a shared variable enviroment to reference a global variable 
    AppDelegate *appdelegate=(AppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];

    //assign the current viewcontroller to the temporary view controller
    appdelegate.preViewController=[self.navigationController.viewControllers lastObject];

    //insert detailed view into the array vcs before the current viewcontroller
        if (![vcs containsObject:DVC]) {
        [vcs insertObject:DVC atIndex:[vcs count]-1];
     }
    // update the self.navigation with the new stack
    [self.navigationController setViewControllers:vcs animated:NO];

    // pop the  othernavigationcontroller from the navigation stack to fake a detailedview controller push 
     [self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

4 - Add a button to replace the default button and define an IBaction (backClicked) for the detailed view controller:

- (IBAction)backClicked:(id)sender{
AppDelegate *appdelegate=(AppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
//push the holder view controller to fake a pop back to the master view controller
[self.navigationController pushViewController:appdelegate.preViewController animated:YES];
}

Answer 2

Considering that you're essentially hacking into the navigation controller, in order to keep the behavior consistent, you need to hack it some more.

Popping a navigation controller releases it from the memory, so you would probably need another array or stack containing popped controllers (pushed controllers from the users perspective, because as far as I see it, you're popping whenever you need to push, and pushing whenever you need to pop). In that array/stack, you would keep the controllers you need to come back to, pushing them into the array/stack just before you pop them.

I'll assume that the mutable array exists somewhere you can access it at all times, and call it otherNavigationController for the sake of simplicity:

DetailedViewController *DVC = [[DetailedViewController alloc]initWithNibName:@"DetailedViewController" bundle:nil];
NSMutableArray *vcs = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:self.navigationController.viewControllers];
[vcs insertObject:DVC atIndex:[vcs count]-1];
[self.navigationController setViewControllers:vcs animated:NO];
[otherNavigationController addObject:self];
[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];

As for the second part of your question, you would need to add custom back button because the default one wouldn't work for you. The custom button should on press push a view controller from the top of the aforementioned array/stack (pop it from the users perspective).

The code for the pop function would go something like this:

UIViewController *previousViewController = [otherNavigationController lastObject];
[otherNavigationController removeLastObject];
[self.navigationController pushViewController:previousViewController animated:YES];

Disclaimer: The code here is untried and untested and I'm not even sure this would work, but it should get you on your way. Good luck!