iPhone Storyboard: different scene for portrait and landscape

Question

If you scroll down a bit at this Apple Developer Page you'll find the section "Creating an Alternate Landscape Interface". The basic approach described there is to present a different NIB file as a modal view when orientation changes. I am using the Storyboard feature, so I don't have NIBs. How do I load a different "scene" in that case?

Besides that, I am using a Tab Bar controller, I don't want to show a modal view. I just want to replace the current portrait view with a landscape view designed with interface builder and keep my tab bar. What would be the Storyboard way to achieve the task "Creating an Alternate Landscape Interface"? Thank you.

Answer 1

When you add a view controller to the storyboard it comes with a view. Call that the container view. Add two views to the container view: a portrait view and a landscape view. Set the dimension of the portrait view and the landscape view appropriately using the size inspector. Add buttons, more views, labels or whatever to the portrait and landscape views as needed for your application. Then when the orientation changes hide one view and show the other.

Answer 2

You can setup a navigation controller and one main view. Then you can use a template view for the portrait and landscape layouts (2 additional views).

You will need to setup the controls on the main view and make sure each one has a unique tag. Your main view will not be used, instead you will copy the controls to the two template views and set them up based on how you want each view to look. The benefit to this is each view will retain its tag which becomes a very important piece of this implementation.

Doing this you use a hybrid approach in regards to writing some UI code and using Interface Builder. After getting the two templates setup, create a unique identifier for each one. You will have to write some logic to handle the view and its subviews. A recursive method to return a collection of these based on the template you choose.

The core logic in the root view controller implementation will need to check for isPortrait and based on this you will want to load the correct view based on the identifier.

Experiment with this concept and see if it works for you. The main benefits to not using two separate views with unique controls (not the shared approach with same tags) is that you maintain access to your original subviews. Any instance variables you define in your view controller that points to a text filed, label, etc... continue to do so regardless of which template view is used. This maintains the model, view, controller approach as the data structure remains unchanged.

Using this approach you can still maximize the use of interface builder, and layout the templates for each view, while still having the flexibility to to write some custom UI code if you desire. Using only interface builder can be a bit limiting at times, and writing custom code based on orientation locks you in to a bit of tedious work.

Hope this helps some.