XIB over Storyboard [closed]

Question

Currently we use Storyboard over xib in all projects. But in my view if you want to make reusable view (custom view or Tableview cell) which can be re-used in different view controllers, you must use xib files as in storyboard there is no way we can make single view object separately.

Note that I am using Storyboard for workflow (view controllers with segues all around) of entire application. Only for reusable tableview cells I am using XIB.

I have searched in lot of apple documents as well as WWDC videos but I could not find any concrete proof from Apple developers which says that XIBs are here to stay or you should use XIB for custom views.

If any of you guys have any kind of links which gives somewhat confidence that we can still use XIB without fear of apple removing it, it would really be appreciated.

Answer 1

Storyboards are recommended when you don't reuse views.

Once you want to reuse something in multiple views/storyboards, then you need XIBs. You already mentioned the example of custom cells. That is something I need quite often and I want to use the same cell in multiple table views. I do the same with charts. I create a chart view in which I set colors etc. and I reuse it everywhere, only putting different data in it. This saves me a lot of code in respect to style/appearance and makes the app easily maintainable. In case of change (e.g. because of new iOS version), I need to change everything on a single place.

Furthermore, I want to have views (e.g. cells) for iPhone and iPad and let the system determine which one to use. For this, again, I need XIBs. I use the notation with ~iphone or ~ipad at the end and I don't have to write code for retrieving the correct view.

This are two things that you simply cannot do without XIBs. So, following the Apple guidelines, my approach is to use storyboards whenever possible and XIBs only when I need them (mainly because of reusability). But there are real cases when one needs XIBs! Simply ignoring them is not a good practice for sure. Actually, in each project I have storyboards as well as XIBs.

Edit: I just found a great post explaining the disadvantages of storyboards. There are plenty of things that I was not aware of.