Incorrect Popover size - when displaying UITableViews under Navigation Controller in Popover

Question

I am writing an iPad app which features UITableViews displayed under a Navigation Controller within a UIPopoverController.

The popover is displayed when I pick a button in the Main View Controller of my app. The popover opens displaying a first TableViewController, which has two rows (UITableViewCells) - "Search" in the first row and "Advanced Settings" in the second row. On initial display, the popover is sized just enough to display the two rows.

I have coded this first TableViewController's didSelectRowAtIndexPath such that when I pick "Search", it pushes a second TableViewController onto the NavigationViewController. This next View Controller allows the user to perform a search, and search results then get populated in its tableview.) This (search results) table view controller is sized long enough to accommodate all the rows returned by the search. The search popover therefore becomes longer when displaying the search tableview controller.

When I cancel the search (or hit the back button in the navigation bar) the popover returns to displaying the first table view controller (the one with just two rows). However this first table view controller now has the longer size. In other words, the popover, instead of resizing itself back to a two row table, remains the size of the second (search results) table view controller (so it now has the two rows "Search" and "Advanced Settings" plus a number of empty rows)

My question is: how can I get each tableview controller in the hierarchy in this implementation (i.e. where table view controllers are displayed in a popover under a navigation controller) to be sized individually and to return to its original size when the user navigates back and forward. There is probably a simple solution to this, but it escapes me! Appreciate if someone can point me to a solution.

Answer 1

As the above solution does not work anymore, here's a more current (Swift) alternative.

You can pass along the popovercontroller to your destinationViewControllers. Then call preferredContentSizeDidChangeForChildContentContainer in viewWillAppear() and the popover will resize automatically.

override func viewWillAppear(animated: Bool) {
    super.viewWillAppear(animated)
    if let ppc = popoverController  {
        ppc.preferredContentSizeDidChangeForChildContentContainer(self)
    }
}

If it doesn't work make sure you properly implement the preferredContentSize. For example calculating the size of the your tableViewController with a single section as such:

override var preferredContentSize: CGSize {
    get {
        let sectionFrame    = self.tableView.rectForSection(0)
        let titleOnTop      = self.navigationController!.navigationBar.frame.height
        let height          = sectionFrame.height + titleOnTop
        return CGSize(width: super.preferredContentSize.width, height: height)
    }
    set { super.preferredContentSize = newValue }
}

Answer 2

I implemented the answer from the following StackOverflow post by user @krasnyk :

Popover with embedded navigation controller doesn't respect size on back nav

It worked great for me with one change ...

Basically added the same function detailed in the above post with one modification (I hardcoded the size for each VC in my view heirarchy in the PopupController)

I referenced this function to set the correct popover size in the ViewDidLoad and ViewDidAppear functions for each VC in the chain of VCs displayed in my PopoverController.

- (void) correctPopoverContentSize {
    //
    // removed the following line from the original code in above post as it did not
    // work for me 
    //      CGSize currentSetSizeForPopover = self.contentSizeForViewInPopover; 

    CGSize currentSetSizeForPopover = CGSizeMake(320.0f, 180.0f);
    CGSize fakeMomentarySize = CGSizeMake(currentSetSizeForPopover.width - 1.0f,    
           currentSetSizeForPopover.height - 1.0f);
    self.contentSizeForViewInPopover = fakeMomentarySize;
    self.contentSizeForViewInPopover = currentSetSizeForPopover;
}