Question

I have a UINavigationController, complete with table view and associated magic.

The data I’m populating that table view from may have items from multiple categories, but the default view for the user will be one in which they are viewing all of the items, and then they have the ability to move backwards to a different table view that would allow them to select a different category, which would then return to the original table view with the appropriate data populated.

What’s the proper approach for this? I can’t seem to wrap my head around how I would make the navigation controller give me a back button (with appropriately wired up actions) without having come from a previous view in the stack (which wouldn’t really exist at launch time if I start the user off from what is essentially the detail view, in stack terms.)

Also, the back button should be titled “Groups”, not “Back”, but that’s really just an implementation detail. 🙂

Update: This issue finally manifested itself in production code, and here’s how I fixed it:

My UINavigationController is created in a nib, with the root view set as the “groups” view. Then, in my app delegate, I push the second view onto the stack while the app is launching.

That works fine for achieving the proper stack, but that doesn’t help with the back button title, because the navigation controller didn’t seem to want to grab the title from the root view, and instead was showing a back button with “Item” as the title.

So, on the pushed view, in viewDidLoad, I set:

self.navigationController.navigationBar.backItem.title = @"Groups";

and that did the trick.

The only potential downside of doing it this way would be if the pushed view controller were ever used in a scenario where the view below it wasn’t the groups view, but since the design of this particular application ensures that never happens, I’m accepting that failure. 😉

Another update:

I’m an idiot. Just set the title property of the navigationItem provided by the navigationController in Interface Builder, and boom, no issue. Or do it in code. It doesn’t matter, just don’t do it by setting the backItem.title way I show you above. That’s just dumb.

Answer 1

In your application delegate’s .m file in the application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: method just push your view controllers like you normally would with[self.navigationController pushViewController:your_view_controller animated:YES]; and it should push them on before the application’s first view controller appears.

To change the text of the button to Groups just call this before pushing your controllers.:

UIBarButtonItem *newBackButton = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle: @"Groups" style: UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered target: nil action: nil];
[[self navigationItem] setBackBarButtonItem: newBackButton];
[newBackButton release];