Question

I have a UIPickerView that animates up and down in a UITableViewController. I adapted an example from apple (DateCell). The UIPickerView is created programmatically, no nib files.

In Portrait mode everything looks nice. When I rotate the simulator (I not testing on the device), the UITableView rotates well, but the picker remains were it was. I read tons of threads about that topic and many developers seem to have problems with pickers behaving weird in landscape mode but at least their pickers rotate. I made a subclass of UIPickerView as described in this link: http://www.llamagraphics.com/developer/using-uidatepicker-landscape-mode, but it didn’t help for the rotation issue.

I tried to rotate the picker with a transform but it looked very weird, like broken.

I’m suspecting that the problem is that I’m using the picker inside of a UITableViewController, and so I add it as a subview of self.view.window. If I try to add the picker as a subview of self.view, only a white frame (without any picker) appears.

Any suggestions?

The initialization code in the UITableViewController subclass:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    if (self.pickerView.superview == nil)
    {
        //Initialization code 
        UIInterfaceOrientation orientation = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] statusBarOrientation];
        CGRect initFrame = orientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait ? CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 200) : CGRectMake(0, 0, 480, 160);

        self.pickerView = [[RotatingUIPickerView alloc] initWithFrame:initFrame];
        [self.pickerView setDelegate:self];
        [self.pickerView setShowsSelectionIndicator:YES];
        [self.pickerView setAutoresizingMask:UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin];

        [self.view.window addSubview:self.pickerView];

        // compute the start frame
        CGRect screenRect = [[UIScreen mainScreen] applicationFrame];
        CGSize pickerSize = [self.pickerView sizeThatFits:CGSizeZero];
        CGRect startRect = CGRectMake(0.0,
                                      screenRect.origin.y + screenRect.size.height,
                                      pickerSize.width, pickerSize.height);

        [self.pickerView setFrame:startRect];

        // compute the end frame
        CGRect pickerRect = CGRectMake(0.0,
                                       screenRect.origin.y + screenRect.size.height - pickerSize.height,
                                       pickerSize.width,
                                       pickerSize.height);

        // start the slide up animation
        [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL];
        [UIView setAnimationDuration:0.3];

        // we need to perform some post operations after the animation is complete
        [UIView setAnimationDelegate:self];

        [self.pickerView setFrame:pickerRect];

        [UIView commitAnimations];
    }
}

Implementation of UIPicker subclass as described on the link above:

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame 
{
    if (self == [super initWithFrame:frame]) 
    {
        for (UIView * subview in self.subviews) 
        {
            [subview setFrame:self.bounds];
        }
    }
    return self;
}

- (id) initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder 
{
    if (self == [super initWithCoder: aDecoder]) 
    {
        for (UIView * subview in self.subviews) 
        {
            [subview setFrame:self.bounds];
        }
    }
    return self;
}

Answer 1

By executing:

 [self.view.window addSubview:self.pickerView];

you are adding pickerView as a subview of your UIWindow. I don’t know how the main UIWindow can be rotated, if it can be.

When you are adding pickerView to the view

 [self.view addSubview:self.pickerView];

you get problems due to the view being a UITableView.

What I suggest is adding pickerView to some intermediate UIView, added as subview to UIWindow and to which you add the UITableView. This intermediate UIView would also have a UIViewController associated to it so that shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation can return the proper value to have auto rotation working.