Design view in Interface Builder to load lazily in UIViewController

Question

I've managed to get my myself confused... I've got a fairly complex View Controller much of which is developed programatically. I'd like to pop up a "dialog" on top of the view controller at some point and I'd like to "design" that view in Interface Builder because it's fairly straightforward (background UIImageView, some UILabels and a UIButton).

I've created the .xib and am now subclassing UIView with the IBOutlets,etc. I'm now trying to wire it up and realizing I probably need to add an initWithNibName: method so this will instantiate correctly...then I realize that I'm really just making another UIViewController and I don't think we're supposed to have UIViewController views w/in other UIViewController views?!?

So now I'm re-thinking how to go about this "correctly." How best to use IB to design a simple 1/4 screen view that will pop up over a main view?

Answer 1

Call +[NSBundle loadNibNamed:owner:] to load the NIB file that contains your view. If you specify your view controller (i.e., self) as the owner, any connections you make to File's Owner in the NIB file will then be made to the view controller. So you could declare an outlet to your custom view in the view controller and after the call

[NSBundle loadNibNamed:@"MyView" owner:self];

the outlet variable will point to the view object. Alternatively, you can use -[NSBundle loadNibNamed:owner:options:], which returns an array of the top-level objects in the NIB.