Question

I’m interested in having a UIViewController that supports all orientations and cleanly uses two xib files to set up its subviews.

One possibility seems to be to use NSBundle’s loadNibNamed: method to load a new view hierarchy at each rotation, but this seems inefficient, and could have unfortunate side effects. For example, after reloading from a nib file, all my views would lose their previous state, such as adding text to a text field, etc.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

After some more research, I was not able to find an elegant solution to this. Because re-loading elements from a xib file at each rotation seemed slow and eliminated any dynamic view-based data, I switched over to a code-based setup (i.e. no more xib files).

I decided to create a method like this:

// This is for an iPad root-level view controller.
- (void)setupForOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)orientation {
  if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsPortrait(orientation)) {
    CGRect bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, 768, 1004);
    bkgImageView.frame = bounds;
    // Other view positioning for portrait.
  } else {
    CGRect bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, 1024, 748);
    bkgImageView.frame = bounds;
    // Other view positioning for landscape.
  }
  [self drawBackgroundForOrientation:orientation];
}

This method is called from the shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method, and handed the new orientation.