Problem with “Presenting a controller modally within a nav controller within a tab bar controller”

Question

My app has two distincts modes. There's a tab bar controller in the app delegate. There are two tabs, both using subclassed view controllers. The two view controllers essentially contain a nav controller each. The nav controllers have their root view controller, and normally when changing screens, I just push and pop controllers of the respective nav controller. This has the (normal) effect that the bottom tab bar is always visible, all great and sound.

This one time I'd like to present a screen modally however, so that the user can't do anything else than confirm or cancel the page using two buttons, ie I want to hide also the bottom tab bar. This would be a case for presenting the view modally I thought, but the view is presented within the nav controller bounds it seems, so the bottom tab bar is still visible, and this causes confusion in navigation the app. I'm not sure how it's possible that the modally presented view is not hiding the tab bar. Most of the questions around here seem to have the problem the other way around (wanting to (incorrectly) present a modal view and leave the tab bar visible).

These are my attempts:

[self presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES]; // inside tab bar controller :-(
[self.tabBarController presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES]; // nothing is displayed. The new controller is instantly deallocated.
[self.navigationController presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES]; // inside tab bar controller :-(

Investigating this, the self.tabBarController is actually nil. There seems to be no link back to the tab bar controller... I guess, to display modally on top of the tab bar, I need to get a link to that tab bar controller?

Jonny Jonny · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-01T02:53:13

I seem to have found a solution, I'm not sure it's kosher, because somehow I wasn't able to use the self.tabBarController pointer of the view controller in which I start the view controller call.

What I did was reach for the app delegate, the app delegate having the tab bar controller defined as a public property. I could use that tab bar controller property to modally display my view controller over everything on the screen.

Problem with “Presenting a controller modally within a nav controller within a tab bar controller”

1 Answers