iPhone - multiple text field search bar

Question

I'm implementing a location based keyword search. If anyone has seen Yelp's search bar, it is what i'm trying to do. Basically once the search bar is clicked i want to provide one text field input for the keyword and the other for location. What UI element would I subclass? How would I go about this?

Answer 1

Yelp's implementation looks to be a custom view with two UITextField objects, with a translation and scale animation to make it appear to be zoomed in from the top. A table view is added to the hierarchy after the animation is finished. The keyboard is invoked by making one of the text fields first responder.

BTW - generally speaking, composing UI elements together is preferred to subclassing.

Answer 2

I also did a similar app, quite a while ago.
What I did in my app was I followed these steps, (I am only giving a brief description not the code part):

Initial look:

• I used search bar inserted into a navigation bar. (I did it programmatically in the viewDidLoad of my class).
• In my xib file of this class, I placed a view at the top and into it placed two UITextFields one below the other. I made this view hidden and shifted its y coordinates by the height of the view so that they became -(viewHeight).

Functionality Part

• As soon as the user touches the search bar placed into the navigation bar, I made it hidden, unhidden the view with the text fields and shifted the y coordinates until they became 0 again.

• In the delegate methods of search bar, - (BOOL)searchBarShouldBeginEditing:(UISearchBar *)searchBar I returned NO, did the animation part (mentioned in the previous step) before returning NO from this method.

• I made my first text field the first responder so that the keyboard appears automatically.

• Now, when I am done filling data in both the text fields I reversed the animations and put the data filled into the text fields to the search bar.

Hope this helps.