Prevent a UISearchDisplayController from hiding the navigation bar

Question

Whenever a user begins editing a UISearchDisplayController's search bar, the search controller becomes active and hides the view's navigation bar while presenting the search table view. Is it possible to prevent a UISearchDisplayController from hiding the navigation bar without reimplementing it?

Answer 1

I just debugged a bit into UISearchDisplayController and found that it's calling a private method on UINavigationController to hide the navigation bar. This happens in -setActive:animated:. If you subclass UISearchDisplayController and overwrite this method with the following code you can prevent the navigationBar from being hidden by faking it to be already hidden.

- (void)setActive:(BOOL)visible animated:(BOOL)animated; {     if(self.active == visible) return;     [self.searchContentsController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:YES animated:NO];     [super setActive:visible animated:animated];     [self.searchContentsController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:NO animated:NO];     if (visible) {         [self.searchBar becomeFirstResponder];     } else {         [self.searchBar resignFirstResponder];     }    } 

Let me know if this works for you. I also hope this won't break in future iOS versions... Tested on iOS 4.0 only.