Customizing the More menu on a Tab bar

Question

I am using a tab bar (UITabBarController) on my app and I wish to customize the appearance of the table that appears when you click the more button. I have worked out how to change the appearance of the Navigation bar that is on the more screen by setting

self.moreNavigationController.navigationBar.barStyle

in a subclass of UITabBarController and I have managed to change the background colour of the table by modifying

self.moreNavigationController.topViewController.view.backgroundColor

, but I cannot work out how to change the font colour in the cells that appear on the table. I was hoping I could use

self.moreNavigationController.topViewController.view.visibleCells 

but this always seems to be empty. I've tried doing this in viewDidLoad, viewWillAppear and viewDidAppear with no success. The object self.moreNavigationController.topViewController is of type UIMoreListController, which seems to be undocumented and I can't see anything obvious in the interface that will help me.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

visibleCells is populated only after the moreNavigationController is displayed.

And the cells are created at runtime, so even if you change the content of the cells, they are replaced when they are displayed.

One thing to try would be to replace the datasource of the moreNavigationController tableView, call the cellForRowAtIndexPath of the original datasource and change its content before returning it.

Using the code below, after having displayed once the moreNavigationController to initialize it, you'll see that when you return to the moreNavigationController, the cells are red, but return immediately to white background.

UITableView *view = (UITableView *)self.tabBarController.moreNavigationController.topViewController.view;
if ([[view subviews] count]) {
  for (UITableViewCell *cell in [view visibleCells]) {
    cell.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor];
  }
}