I have a SplitViewController which has two UITableViewControllers – one master/root one detail. Everything works swimmingly.
I have a UIView which is shown on the detail view controller before the user selects an item in the root view controller. It’s set up like this:
[self.navigationController.view addSubview:makeSentenceHelperView];
[self.navigationController.view bringSubviewToFront:makeSentenceHelperView];
The detailViewController is set up like so:
UINavigationController *detailNav = [[[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:detailViewController] autorelease];
Where detailViewController is a subclass of UITableView.
The problem is that this subView hides the buttons and navigation bar from the detail view controller’s navigation bar – which is a problem when you launch the SVC in portrait mode (there’s no way to select a root item with the root popup).

How can I present the view inside the navigation controller, so that the navigation bar and buttons appear in the detail view?
To fix this I added a UINavigationController to my helper UIView, and added a UIButtonBarItem to call the popover for selecting a new item in the master view. It seems really simple in retrospect. The only tricky bit will be making the UIButtonBarItem hide when in landscape.