UISearchDisplayController Without Dimming?

Question

I am writing a SplitView iPad app. Inside the DetailViewController, there's a little view that contains a UITableView and a UISearchBar and its controller. This view does not represent the whole screen space reserved for the DetailViewController. Actually, it uses just half of it. There's an UIImageView on the other half.

And this is where trouble comes in: every time I use the search bar, the displaycontroller (I assume) dims everything present inside the DetailViewController, including the image view. That is not consistent with what someone would expect when running the app. Is there any way to set the frame to be dimmed? Or at least disable dimming for good?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You are correct that it is the UISearchDisplayController that is managing the "dimming" effect that you're seeing.

What the UISearchDisplayController is doing is adding a UIControl as a subview to the view of the searchContentsController (a property of UISearchDisplayController), which is likely your detail-view controller. This UIControl is just an alpha'd view with a gray background. It seems to have a touch-up-inside event handler that ends searching when tapped.

To constrain the dimming effect to your sub-view of the detail-view, you need to do three things. (I'm assuming your detail-view-controller is defined via a xib. If not, these steps can be done in code too.)

1) add a new UIViewController to your detail-view-controller xib. Attach this new view-controller to an IBOutlet of your detail-view-controller. In my example I call this "_searchAreaViewController". This is important, even if you wont ever access the view controller (but remember, you'll have to release it at some point)

@interface DetailViewController : UIViewController <UIPopoverControllerDelegate, UISplitViewControllerDelegate, UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource> {

    UIPopoverController *popoverController;
    UIToolbar *toolbar;

    id detailItem;
    UILabel *detailDescriptionLabel;

    IBOutlet UIViewController* _searchAreaViewController;
}

2) make the containing view for your search area the view of this new view-controller. To do this, use Interface Builder to set a new referencing outlet for this view by dragging the outlet to the searchAreaViewController and selecting the "view" outlet. You must have a containing view - it should be a subview of your detail-view, and it should contain the UISearchBar and likely your UITableView.

3) make the searchContentsController property of the UISearchDisplayController refer to this new view controller instead of the detail-view-controller. This can only be done via Interface Builder as the property is read-only (IB has some magic to make this work?) If you need to do this step via code you'll have to subclass the UISearchDisplayController and return the correct value from a property override of "searchContentsController".

I made a sample app to demonstrate this and the only line of code I had to add to the SplitView template was the one listed in step 1 above. Everything else was just adding the views/controllers and connecting them properly in IB.

good luck!

Answer 2

iOS 8+

    [[UIView appearanceWhenContainedInInstancesOfClasses:@[NSClassFromString(@"UISearchDisplayControllerContainerView")]] setHidden:YES];

iOS 7

    [View appearanceWhenContainedIn:NSClassFromString(@"UISearchDisplayControllerContainerView"), nil] setHidden:YES];

I know, that UISearchDisplayController is deprecated for now, but if you still need to use it, you can solve your issue with one line of code perfectly. Add it to viewDidLoad method.