Loading a UIViewController xib to ContainerView in storyboard

Question

I have a "container" viewController, that hold a few container views using storyboard. each of that container view has a link to an embedded viewcontroller's view.

Since im working on a big project, it turns out that the storyboard file is massive and contains a lot of "child" viecontrollers view layout. it will be a problem working on that file when a few people needs to be working simultaneously on it. and thats not good for me. i would like to know if theres a way to load into each container view a viewcontroller's xib file, and still be using storyboard.

Meaning, creating .xib files for each viewcontroller instead of holding them in the storyboard itself, and link them to the container views in the storyboard.

thanks,

Answer 1

You can move your view controller layout into a separate xib. As you say, this is a very convenient way to share layouts across storyboards.

When setting up a container view in your storyboard, make sure you delete the provided view in the embedded ViewController. Set the custom class for the ViewController to your class name. Name the xib to match the class (e.g. FooViewController.xib so it can be found when FooViewController.m is loaded.)

If you don't delete the View in the storyboard view controller layout, you'll see that empty view instead. Your viewDidLoad method in your view controller won't be called, because the View is the default Storyboard View.

I'm using Xcode 6.1 for iOS 8 on a pre-iOS 7 project.