iPhone: NavigationController NavigationBar Back button text

Question

When I push a new ViewController onto a navigation controller stack the "back" button is the Title of the previous controller.

How can I change the text in the back button to "Back" instead of the default name-of-last-controller?

Answer 1

You need to create a custom button on the navigation controller. Put the following code in the viewDidLoad in your Root View Controller:

UIBarButtonItem * tempButtonItem = [[[ UIBarButtonItem alloc] init] autorelease];
tempButtonItem .title = @"Back";

self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = tempButtonItem ;

By setting the navigation bar button on the Root View Controller, the pushed view shows the appropriate back button.

Answer 2

You can actually set the title on the main view controller's navigationItem's title. Basically each UIViewController has a little stub UINavigationItem which contains metadata about how that view should be referenced inside a UINavigationController. By default, that metadata just falls back to the UIViewController itself.

Assuming 'self' is the UIViewController of the view that's visible inside the UINavigationController, set:

self.navigationItem.title = @"My Custom Title"