Question

My goal is, to have a subclassed UIView (lets call it infoView) designed in his own XIB so that I can present it in many UIViewController‘s.

The Problem:
So far, when I was adding UIView‘s to a UIViewController I always had to make an UIViewController the file’s owner of the UIView‘s .xib file to load the view with something like:

...
//this is inside the calling UIViewController's method
// InfoView *infoView is ivar and a subclass of UIView
infoView = nil; 
NSArray *bundle = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"InfoView"
                                                owner:self options:nil];

for (id object in bundle) {
    if ([object isKindOfClass:[InfoView class]])
        infoView = (InfoView *)object;
}   

[[self view] addSubview:infoView]; 
...

But I want to use the same UIView in many different UIViewController‘s, so I actually don’t want a file’s owner except maybe the class itself. In ThomasM’s question he was setting the UIView itself to be the file’s owner but without success.

In the answers there I found a solution to set the file’s owner to nil. To do so I had to add all calling UIViewController objects from the Interface Builder object library to the InfoView.xib file and connect them with their infoView outlets.

But this doesn’t feel right. So here I would like to collect solutions to
encapsulate a UIView together with his xib-file to use it in many different view controllers. How do you guys handle that?

Thx for any help.

EDIT:

The infoView is something like an overlay which appears when the user presses a button on one of the view controllers. It’s NOT the View controllers “main” view. It gives detailed informations about the view of his superviews view controller and will disappear afterwards. I only fill the infoView with different contents threw out all the calling view controllers.

Answer 1

Like Hollance answer was pointing out I am using UINib.

To use it, leave the .xib files owner nil and place all customization of the infoView inside the initWithCoder: method of your InfoView class implementation. This will get called if you obtain the InfoView.xib like:

// here InfoView is the name of the .xib file
UINib *infoNib = [UINib nibWithNibName:@"InfoView" bundle:nil];

NSArray *topLevelObjects = [infoNib instantiateWithOwner:self options:nil];

QInfoView *infoView = [topLevelObjects objectAtIndex:0];