iOS version of Fragments

Question

Can anyone tell me what the best way to do the following is in Xcode (iPhone).

I have a main navigation screen with some buttons on it. When the user clicks any of the buttons they are taken to a sub-navigation screen with more option buttons on it. Here they click whichever button and are taken to a list of options. Clicking on any list option will display a screen with some information to the user. Each one of these screen ( no matter what section of the app you're in) will look the same. Only text and images on these screens will change.

I have enclosed a diagram that might explain it better. What is the best way to handle this in Xcode? I have tried doing it all in Stroyboard as I'm new to Objective C but just the sheer amount of individual pages is slowing my machine down to a crawl. So a rethink is required.

I am also doing an Android version of this app and I'm using Fragments for this. Can anyone please help?

EDIT: Just got to my devel machine and this is what I have been doing so far. I realise now this is the complete wrong way to do it. I have created a view controller for each "screen" if you like.

So I just create one view controller for all "screen" of e.g. Individual Page as per diagram and then add the text dynamically depending on what screen is selected? Can anyone point me in the direction of a tutorial or what I need to be searching for? I have no idea where to start with this using Xcode.

Answer 1

If the elements of the view are the same (and only the actual text and images are changing), all you need to do in your storyboard is to create one view controller that will have all these ui elements, from code you can then set it up depending on the content that you want to display in it (depending on what the user clicked in the previous view controller).

EDIT: Not sure why it was downvoted, but i'll be more clear. Clearly that one view controller is not ALL you need to do in the storyboard. It's all you need to do ON the storyboard related to all the elements called Page in the diagram. Then you would have to link it to a PageViewController class and to all the outlets related to configurable UI elements and in the code of your prepareForSegue: method from the Secondary Nav Screen View Controller you would have to configure it accordingly to what you want to show.

Here you can find a good beginner's tutorial, along with many other good tutorials. What you're probably missing is that you also need to tell the storyboard what class the view controller is and how to connect stuff like labels and imageviews to the actual code so that you can configure them appropriately.

I.E.

Answer 2

From what you're describing, it sounds like you want a UINavigationController as your app's window's rootViewController and to show your screens inside that. You want to create four controller classes:

• HMMainScreenController
• HMSecondaryScreenController
• HMListScreenController
• HMPageController

Hopefully it's obvious what would be in each. You'd set up your window in your app delegate like this:

HMMainScreenController *mainController = [[HMMainScreenController alloc] init];
UINavigationController *navigationController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:mainController];

self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
self.window.rootViewController = navigationController;
[self.window makeKeyAndVisible];

When the user taps a button in your main controller, you'd do this:

HMSecondaryScreenController *secondaryController = [[HMSecondaryScreenController alloc] init];
// configure it appropriately
[self.navigationController pushViewController:secondaryController];

and so on for your list and page controllers.