When does it make sense to store your NIBs inside a bundle?. As we’ve discussed before… this becomes handy when you’re distributing a framework which has some custom NIB files.
But wait…. how do you tell a UIViewController to load its nib file from a bundle?. Short answer… we’ll rely on UIViewController’s ‘initWithNibName: bundle:’ constructor.
Before doing that… we need to take care about a small detail, which is, how to load a NSBundle object (to pass on as the ‘bundle’ parameter).
We’ll show you the required code below, encapsulated into a nice helper class:
[cc lang=”objc”]
@interface LABundles
+ (NSBundle*)someResourcesBundle;
@end
@implementation LABundles
NSString* const kSomeResourcesBundleName = @”SomeResources.bundle”;
+ (NSBundle*) someResourcesBundle
{
static NSBundle* someResourcesBundle = nil;
if ( someResourcesBundle == nil )
{
@synchronized(self)
{
if ( someResourcesBundle == nil )
{
NSString* bundlePath = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:kSomeResourcesBundleName];
someResourcesBundle = [[NSBundle bundleWithPath:bundlePath] retain];
}
}
}
return someResourcesBundle;
}
@end
[/cc]
Finally, in order to alloc an UIViewController, and load its nib from the SomeResources bundle, we need to do the following:
[cc lang=”objc”]
SomeViewController* someVC = [[SomeViewController alloc] initWithNibName:NSStringFromClass([SomeViewController class])
bundle:[LABundles someResourcesBundle]];
[/cc]
That’s it!. SomeViewController should be loading its nib file from the someResources bundle.