Sequential (not hierarchical) navigation in iPhone

Question

I'm getting frustrated at this.

I want to create an iPhone application to show a list of events, one day for each 'screen'. I want a bar at the top with 'next' and 'prev' buttons that allow me to go to tomorrow or yesterday.

It is not a UINavigationController style navigation, because navigation is not hierarchical. Therefore I don't think I should use the pushViewController: method, as many examples and tutorials suggest.

I think that the appdelegate class should remove the current view and create a new viewcontroller and view and add it to the window. However I can't manage to get it working. Also I would like nice transitions.

Can someone point to a code sample that I can look at?

Thank you.

P.D. My question is similar to this one but there is no useful answer.

Answer 1

I wouldn't get hung up on the view controller so much. The view controller/view duality can sometimes get in the way of building custom interfaces.

What you need is a UIToolbar with two buttons, and a sorted array of UIView objects configured appropriately for your entities.

Then when the buttons are clicked, simple [UIVIew animations] should get the job done.

I'm not going to write the code for you. Any casual analysis of the build in UIView animation components will point you on your way.

The only real thing I can tell you is that, having built sophisticated interfaces for the iPhone, the biggest learning curve is knowing when and when not to use UIViewController as opposed to UIView. This is tricky because most of the standard apple components use Controller.

Answer 2

Now it works. Just some details were missing. I'll leave the answer here so that other people can comment on it or use it.

In the AppDelegate class I added this method:

-(void) navigateToDay:(NSDate*) newDay fromDay:(NSDate*) currentDay
{
    UIViewAnimationTransition transition = ([newDay compare:currentDay]<0)? UIViewAnimationTransitionCurlDown :
        UIViewAnimationTransitionCurlUp;

    SequentialNavigationViewController* newController = [[SequentialNavigationViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"SequentialNavigationViewController" bundle:nil];

    newController.app = self;
    newController.currentDay = newDay;
    [newController.view setFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] applicationFrame]];

    [UIView beginAnimations:@"transition" context:NULL];
    [UIView setAnimationDuration:0.50];
    [UIView setAnimationTransition:transition forView:self.window cache:YES];
    [window addSubview:newController.view];
    [self.viewController.view removeFromSuperview];
    [UIView commitAnimations];

    self.viewController = newController;
    [newController release];
   }

And I call this method from the SequentialNavigationViewController prevButtonClicked and nextButtonClicked methods.

Not so hard after all!