Adding a Dynamic Custom Title to a modal view's Navigation Bar

[Vinny Coyne]

Adding a Dynamic Custom Title to a modal view's Navigation Bar

I've seen this issue come up a couple of times recently and figured I'd share a solution to it here.

It probably isn't the best way of achieving this, so if anyone has a better solution, feel free to comment :)


First, create your modal view controller (with a .xib) - I've used the name MyModalView for this example.

Open up the xib in Interface Builder and drag a navigation bar onto the view. Next delete the Title text from the nav bar.

Drag a label into place over where the Title text should go and customise the font to your liking.


What we want to do next is create a property in our MyModalView class that allows us to set the custom title.

Header:

@interface MyModalView : UIViewController {

IBOutlet UILabel* barTitle;

NSString* customTitle;
}

@property(nonatomic,retain) NSString* customTitle;

@end



Implementation file:

@implementation MyModalView

@synthesize customTitle;

- (void)viewDidLoad {

...

barTitle.text = self.customTitle;

}

- (void)dealloc {

[self.customTitle release];

...
}


Creating the Modal View:

When that's done, save all your files and link the UILabel outlet to the label in Interface Builder.


Now, wherever we are presenting the modal view, we can now simply do the following:

MyModalView* mv = [[[MyModalView alloc] initWithNibName:@"MyModalView" bundle:nil] autorelease];

mv.customTitle = @"Some Title";

[self presentModalViewController:mv animated:YES];


And it will display your custom modal view with the "Some Title" text on the navigation bar.

[Vinny Coyne]

Awesome, thanks Daniel! :)

[Daniel Heffernan]

np! And it doesn't even have to be set before displaying it either: you can do it while on the screen just fine and it will update reliably.

[Vinny Coyne]

Thanks Daniel, I knew there had to be a better way!

All you'd need to do then is set either the nav bar or an NSString as a property and set the new value before displaying the modal view.

[Daniel Heffernan]

If you have a UINavigationBar in IB it will have a default UINavigationItem that you can access. Why not just have an IBOutlet from the file's owner to that UINavigationItem?

@interface MyModalView {
IBOutlet UINavigationItem *myItem;
}

@implementation MyModalView
- (void)viewDidLoad {
...
myBar.title = @"New title!";
}