add background image to UITableViewController in Navigation based app

Question

I have a navigation based app where I push UITableViewControllers onto the stack. I would like to add a background UImage to all of my UITableViewControllers. Not a UIColor, but an UImage. I know how I can do this using a Nib file and setting the UITableView itself to have use [UIColor ClearColor], but I don't want to go through all my UITableViewControllers and change them to using Nib files, etc.

I also found this solution which would be great if I was just using a single tableviewcontroller in my app. I think there might be a way to make this work, by adding a subview "below" my table view that is created by default in a UITableViewController?

Any suggestions would be great.

Answer 1

It's a little different in a navigation based app: just change the background of the navigation view that each table view is sitting on. Placing the following code in viewDidLoad of each UITableViewController works:

self.navigationController.view.backgroundColor = 
[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"myImage.png"]];
self.tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

But you may only need to do it once, at the top level of the navigation controller, rather than in each tableview controller (although you'll still have to set each background to clear).