Call master view controller from within detail view of split view controller

Question

I have a tab bar controller with 3 tabs, each embedded within its own navigation controller. This works great, but now I’m trying to put the entire tab bar controller within a split view controller.

The problem is the navigation on the master view for the split view controllers hides the existing navigation for the views inside the tab bar controller. If I hide the master view navigation, I get my tab bar controller navigation back but then I have no way of getting back to the master list. I can add the button back in programmatically but it only works on the iPad.

navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = splitViewController?.displayModeButtonItem() 
navigationItem.leftItemsSupplementBackButton = true

I also tried playing around with the various options for preferredDisplayMode, but again, this only works on the iPad. It has no effect on the iPhone. I can add in a custom button programmatically to the view controller within the tab view controller and call an action from there, but I don't know what action to call. I tried calling the action on the displayModeButtonItem:

splitViewController?.displayModeButtonItem().action

That didn't work either. I would like to be able to just programmatically add back in the behavior of the back button that the split view controller adds on the iPhone.

Answer 1

I ended up scrapping the split view controller and just using anther tab. However I had a similar problem in another app and I figured out a kind of hacky solution. I embedded the tab bar controller itself inside a navigation controller. This causes multiple navigation controllers to appear so I did a check in viewWillAppear to hide whichever navigation controller is causing the issue.

if let hidden = tabBarController?.navigationController?.navigationBarHidden {
    if hidden == true {
        tabBarController?.navigationController?.navigationBarHidden = false
    }
}

This app has a split view controller as the root view controller and then tab bar controllers in both the master and detail views. Every view is embedded in a navigation controller and I just show or hide the navigation bar depending on if I have a duplicate.