Question

Hey all. Something which has been bugging me quite a bit recently is this custom movie player I’ve put together. It’s largely based on a working one, NGMoviePlayer.

The issue is this: I have the .xib in a UIKit-friendly resource bundle. When I call:

[MyMoviePlayerViewController initWithNibName:@"MyMoviePlayerViewController"
 bundle:[NSBundle bundleWithPath:
         [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]
          stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"MyMoviePlayerViewController.bundle"]];

..on my custom class, and then access the view (thus calling loadView) it doesn’t throw any errors, but nor does it actually load the outlets properly. I am presented with a white screen, and debugging shows that all visual elements are 0x0, but there was no error as would be expected.

EDIT: I’ve also now tried just loading the .xib outside of a resource bundle in my target app, and the same thing happens (white screen).

The particular ones I was looking for was either:

• Could not load NIB <nibname>... if it wasn’t found at all, or
• ...loaded the <nibname> NIB but the view outlet was not set if it was found but not connected properly

The xib is in the local app (I understand that static libs can’t contain xibs). I’ve tried using this same resource bundle with the NGMoviePlayerDemo project provided by the author of NGMoviePlayer, and it does throw an error:

Could not load NIB in bundle:
'/Users/.../MyMoviePlayerViewController.bundle (not yet loaded)'
 with name 'MyMoviePlayerViewController'

I have navigated to the path it displays for the bundle and there exists a MyMoviePlayerViewController.xib file at that location.

I’ve also tried using bundle:nil in case Xcode combined the resources of bundle directories with the main one for some reason. Both cases throw no error and display a white screen in my actual project. Both cases throw a Could not load NIB error in the NGMoviePlayerDemo project.

EDIT: I have tried the same .xib separate from a resource bundle in the NGMoviePlayerDemo app and it works fine.

All input is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Solution: Pay attention to Unknown class <classname> in Interface Builder file. messages.

I had the code for the movie player in a static lib, and the parent view controller for the movie player was being included in the project as an external header, but the subviews weren’t included as headers, so they weren’t being located properly. Because the only place they were being referenced in my target app was within the .xib file, there were no compile errors to do with those subclasses, but when it came time to load the .xib those classes could not be found, so none of their properties were set. And that just so happened to include all of the controls for the player, which probably then made the initialisation code silently fall over.

I merged all of the code and ivars from the subclasses into the parent movie player class, and it’s working fine now 🙂