Chapter 15. Creating advanced view controllers
This chapter covers
- Tab-based interfaces
- Navigation-based interfaces
- The flipside controller
When we started our look at view controllers in chapter 13, we promised that we’d return to the more advanced view controllers that manage several pages of content at once. That’s the purpose of this chapter: to introduce you to the final fundamental building block of the iPhone OS that allows you to build complex multipage applications.
In this chapter we’ll take an in-depth look at two view controllers: the tab bar controller and the navigation controller. We’ll also take a briefer look at the flipside controller that appears in one of Xcode’s templates and talk about some modal controllers that we’ll see in part 4 of this book.
As in our previous chapter on view controllers, we’ll offer some more skeletal examples since our main purpose is to provide you with the reusable programming frameworks that will allow you to use these controllers in your own programs. Let’s kick off our discussion with the tab bar view controller.
Of the multipage view controllers, the tab bar is the easiest to use because it supports simple navigation between several views. As with all of the advanced view controllers, it has a complex underlying structure incorporating several objects that work in tandem.
To function, a tab bar view controller requires a hierarchy of at least six objects: