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?

Solution 1

The new UISearchController class introduced with iOS 8 has a property hidesNavigationBarDuringPresentation which you can set to false if you want to keep the navigation bar visible (by default it will still be hidden).

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

The simplest solution and no hacks.

@interface MySearchDisplayController : UISearchDisplayController

@end

@implementation MySearchDisplayController

- (void)setActive:(BOOL)visible animated:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super setActive: visible animated: animated];

    [self.searchContentsController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden: NO animated: NO];
}

@end

Solution 4

The above answers didn't work quite right for me. My solution is to fool the UISearchDisplayController into thinking there wasn't a UINavigationController.

In your view controller, add this method

- (UINavigationController *)navigationController {
    return nil;
}

This had no untoward side effects for me, despite seeming like a really bad idea... If you need to get at the navigation controller, use [super navigationController].

Solution 5

Since iOS 8.0 the same behavior can be achieved by setting the UISearchController's self.searchController.hidesNavigationBarDuringPresentation property to false.

The code in Swift looks like this:

searchController.hidesNavigationBarDuringPresentation = false

View more solutions

Comments

[gyozo kudor]

This is a lot simpler than the accepted answer. It worked for me as well.

[Jan Aagaard]

How did you do figure this out? I would like to change the behavior of the search, so that it keeps the table view dimmed until the user clicks on the search button, and your debugging solutions seems like a really elegant way to achieve this.

[Mr. Míng]

Great, this is the best answer!

[titaniumdecoy]

The navigation bar slides up and down again when the user focuses on the text field. With animated:NO, it pops back into place. Both alternatives look bad.

[malhal]

I read all the proposed solutions and this was by far the simplest and the best.

[richy]

I got: *** Assertion failure in -[UISearchDisplayController setActive:animated:] when hitting the cancel button.

[richy]

Fixed this by calling [self.searchDisplayController setActive:NO animated:NO]; in - (void)searchBarCancelButtonClicked:(UISearchBar *)searchBar

[joerick]

Hmm. It's possible this no longer works with current iOS versions.

[Sylverb]

This is preventing some things to work correctly (like search scope or editable tableview)

[Adriana]

Agreed, this is the simplest solution. Just for completion: if you're using a xib, then select the search display controller, tap the identity inspector and change the class to MySearchDisplayController.

[paiv]

Have you tried navigating to detail controller from results and back? This breaks views layout for me. iOS 6.1

[Gajendra K Chauhan]

not working for me.I've added but not found searchContentsController

[Teofilo Israel Vizcaino Rodrig]

Definitively this is the solution

[Irina]

this doesn't work when you have a detail view you want to show. once clicks back from the detail view the search bar slides under the navbar.

[Irina]

this should be the answer. accepted answer doesn't fix the bug when you have a detail view.

[Fateh Khalsa]

USE THIS ANSWER! This is fully functional, and Does Not have the detail view bug that the accepted answer has. Tested working in iOS 6/7.

[stigi]

Thanks guys for the responses. Let's ping @hadronzoo, shall we? :)

[Mike Sprague]

This worked for me with iOS 7 on the iPad. However, I added some code that makes it only return nil when the search display controller is calling it & it's on the ipad, otherwise it behaves normally. pastebin.com/6pJ2WWsy

[mkko]

Anyone else get this exception: [<__NSArrayI 0xa6b82a0> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key colorMatrix. I'm using this on iPhone 7.0.3. @stigi's solution throws this as well.

[jakenberg]

@mkko in iOS7, there's a property that you can set on UISearchDisplayController called displaysSearchBarInNavigationBar

[mkko]

@jsksma2 Thanks, but I know of it and it's not really serving my purpose. displaysSearchBarInNavigationBar replaces the toolbar with its own class and I couldn't find a way to replace the title temporarily with a label. I was looking for a toolbar similar to Apple Maps and had to make one of my own (a UIView with buttons mimicing bar button items).

[Matt Hudson]

Thank goodness for this post. I looked through several to no avail. This worked fantastic to prevent iOS 7 from janking up my UISearchDisplayController and UISearchBar animations.

[Richie Hyatt]

worked for me by just adding part of this:-(void)viewDidLayoutSubviews { [self.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:NO animated:NO]; // don't hide navigation bar when user taps the search bar }

[Admin]

Nice answer! But i had to add self.searchContentsController.edgesForExtendedLayout = UIRectEdgeBottom; for iOS 7

[stigi]

@SebastianKeller yes, actually the answer is from 2010. That's way before iOS 7 & edgesForExtendedLayout :)

[Admin]

@stigi: i know the answer is some years old, I just wanted to leave a hint if somebody else struggles with this on iOS 7 :)

[Giorgos Ath]

That doesn't really fix the problem. It does not hide the nav bar but if you have some scope bars below, then trying to tap on a scope bar makes search display controller resign first responder (scope bars now are bellow black semi-dimmed view for hiding the tableview behind...). Must find way to layout all views again... :(

[Saleh Masum]

I subclassed UISearchDisplayController and set the subclass from storyboard. But the overridden method never gets called.

[Javier Giovannini]

This is the right answer, but with the stigi code (below).

[heading_to_tahiti]

This is the correct answer for iOS 8 UISearchController!!

[avance]

I was having a similar problem, my navigation bar was disappearing when the keyboard appeared. Using the last 2 methods of the above code fixed it.

[Vaibhav Jhaveri]

Any solution for that ?

[Khant Thu Linn]

I still need to push. [self.navigationController pushViewController:[iFeedbackFormStyle2VC loadFromNib] animated:YES]; But if it is empty, i can't push. how shall i do?

[joerick]

@KhantThuLinn use [super navigationController] instead of self.navigationController

[Boris Nikolic]

This should be accepted answer. Works on iOS 8 for UISearchController.

[ghostatron]

Can't decide if I'm amazed or horrified, but this worked. The stigi answer was close, but when I tapped into the search bar, the thing would still slide up BEHIND my nav bar (i.e. I could type and have the search "work", but I couldn't see the text).

[manmal]

This API is available since iOS 8.0

[Goppinath]

Ya, it is available since iOS 8.0.

[New-Learner]

This is the simple solution