selectively allowing autorotation in TabBar / UINavigation app

Question

Hello:

I have a UITabBar/UINavigation application and I'm having some trouble allowing autorotation in a given view.

The TabBar allows changing sections, with table view items. When one of the items is tapped, I push a new view which hides the TabBar and which should autorotate. I tried the easy way, which seemed most logical to me: disable autorotate in the rootViewController and allow in the detailViewController, but this didn't work (shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation returns YES, but then willRotateToInterfaceOrientation is never called and view doesn't autorotate). I read that all VCs in a TabBar should return YES to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation, so I did that, but the result is that now my whole application rotates.

I then subclassed my UINavigationController and set shouldAutorotate to NO, hoping that I could detect when the view that was being shown was in fact a detailView, and then return YES... I can't seem to do that.

Any help out there?

Thanks!

Antonio

Answer 1

It sounds like you've got a set up like the iPod app which has a tabbar for playlist view, songs view etc but which disappears when you go to a detail view for a song. The detail view can rotate but the tabbar views do not. When you do rotate the tabbar it turns into a cover flow detail view.

I'm pretty sure they do this by putting the tabbar inside a navigation controller. When you go to the detail view, it pops the tabbar entirely and pushes the detail view.

So the actual hierarchy looks something like:

Nav {
    tabbar {
        playlist
        Artist
        //... other tabs
    }
    detail view portrait
    detail view cover flow
}

Only one of the sibling views (tabbar, detail portrait, detail coverflow) is pushed at any one time.

The iPod app does this because the detail view is the primary functional view for the entire app so the rest of the app is built around navigating to it. If that is not the case for your app, then this setup may be more trouble than it is worth.