Question

I am attempting to use a button to go from one View (XIB) to another View. I’m using Xcode 4.3.2 and iOS 5. I start off by creating the project (Single View Application). I then create my button in Interface Builder, create my outlet in the header file, and my IBAction in the .m file. Next, I right clicked on my project folder in Xcode and selected “New File”. I then selected “Object-C Class” and named it “SecondViewController”. Two new files were created, “SecondViewController.h” and “SecondViewController.m”. Then I went back and right clicked on my project folder in Xcode, selected “New File” and chose “view” out of the “User Interface” options.

Now I have my empty IBAction (my button) which I want to use to go to a new view, which is called SecondViewController.xib.

If the creation of the new XIB and .h/.m files are correct up to this point, then how would I go about doing this using my button to “get to” or display my second view? Keep in mind, I’m still at a beginner level and I appreciate any help and your patience 🙂

The only differences I can tell between my main View and my SecondView are in the header files:

Main View header file:

@interface ButtonToNewViewViewController : UIViewController

Second View header file:

@interface SecondViewController : NSObject

IBAction:

-(IBAction)nextView:(id)sender
{
    // go to new view
}

Answer 1

This is quite a simple task that are covered by many tutorials online, but I’ll give you some help anyways. 🙂

First of all, when you create SecondViewController, remember to create it as a subclass of UIViewController, not NSObject. So unless you have done a lot of work with those files, you can just go ahead and recreate them. At the same time you can make sure that Xcode creates the xib-file for you automatically by checking a checkbox in the creation-process.

When you have created SecondViewController (.h, .m and .xib), open up ButtonToNewViewController.m and put #import "SecondViewController.h" at the top of the file. In your method nextView:, you can then use these two lines to change to the second view controller:

SecondViewController *second = [[SecondViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"SecondViewController" bundle:nil];
[self presentViewController:second animated:YES completion:nil];

That should pop up the second view controller, with some simple animation. Make sure that the string you pass to initWithNibName: has the same name as your .xib-file.

And if you want to go back to ButtonToNewViewController, you can use this in a method in SecondViewController:

[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];

That should clear things up a bit. 🙂