inessential by Brent Simmons
27 Sep 2014

UISplitViewController Question

Picture an app with three levels of hierarchy. Let’s pretend it’s an RSS reader (it’s not).

Feeds > Timeline > Article

The modern way to make this work for iPad and iPhone is to use a UISplitViewController.

  • Left: navigation controller with Feeds and Timeline.

  • Right: navigation controller with Article.

Launch in portrait on iPhone 6 Plus. The Feeds view controller takes up the full screen. Good.

Tap a feed. The Timeline appears full screen. Good.

Now rotate — the split view now appears. On the left is Feeds; on the right is Timeline. Not good.

And, if I tap a feed, a second Timeline appears in the left, which means two timelines are showing.

I have my project set up almost exactly like the Xcode template for a split view controller app. The difference is really just that the master has Feeds and Timeline view controllers, instead of just a single Feeds view controller.

How do I get the Timeline to move to the master (leftmost) side when going from compact to regular horizontal size class?

My question is much like this unanswered question on Stack Overflow. A difference is that I’m using a selection segue instead of pushing a view controller. (I’m not sure the difference matters. At any rate, we have the same issue.)

Update 2:30 pm: I ran into serious trouble when nothing I tried seemed to do anything. Clean builds didn’t help. It wasn’t till I noticed that breakpoints in delegate methods weren’t getting hit — and I was about to file a Radar — that I realized I probably needed to delete the DerivedData folder. So I did, and things started working. So: consider that a reminder.

I’ve published a gist that shows what I’ve got so far. I’m sure it’s not the final version of the code — splitViewController:​collapseSecondary​ViewController:​ontoPrimary​ViewController: will need more logic — but it solves the problem so far.

Thanks to Tim Ekl and Saniul Ahmed for help via Twitter.

And — bonus — @FriedLemur has the tip of the day (regarding DerivedData):

Option key turns Clean into Clean Build Folder, pretty much rm -rf

That’s so much better than me trying to remember where the DerivedData folder actually is.